Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don’t have to be media related (they still can be though).
Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don’t have to be media related (they still can be though).
Sound engineering. Most people think sound is somehow sine waves and that’s it. And well, that’s technically correct on some level, but you can layer sound waves on top of each other to create triangle waves or square waves or what specific instruments happen to sound like:
Source
And well, these aspects have implications. Like with an oboe, even the basic waveform is quite interesting, so it’s excellent for solos.
On the other hand, with a more boring sound, like a sine wave, you can do relatively wild things in terms of melody or combining them into intervals, and listeners won’t feel overwhelmed as quickly.
And then you’ve got the fun field of drums. You can often just take white noise (or pink noise etc.) and just make its volume drop off rapidly and that already sounds similar to a drum.
Which is again interesting on the boring/interesting spectrum. That noise signal adds a short moment of chaos into the mix. But then we often make drums play quite structured rhythms to entertain a different boring/interesting spectrum over time.
I love sound engineering and design as a whole. Music production was what got me into it. It’s still mind boggling to me how much you can do with a simple sine wave and process it into essentially unlimited amounts of various sounds.
I never knew a thing about music theory, synthesizers, drum machines, etc. Almost 7 years down this path and I’m still learning as I go and just as curious as when I first started.
Seeing different instruments through an oscilloscope or watching the different frequencies dance as a whole on an EQ plugin is my favorite.
The thing for me is, I did already know large chunks of music theory before getting into sound design, but traditional music theory doesn’t concern itself with waveforms.
So, I know that a fourth interval sounds spiritual or that a triad in the base key sounds like ‘home’, i.e. you probably don’t want to return there fully, unless you’re concluding the journey / music piece.
But like, these are two completely random, basic examples and I don’t know what the waveforms look like for them. Whether there’s anything in the waveforms that correlates with that perception.
So, it feels like I learned most of the chemistry without any of the physics. And that I do now need to learn the physics to discover more of the chemistry. That there’s potentially even quite large chunks of uncharted territory for music theory, because everyone’s so obsessed with chemistry. Will have to see, if I’ll discover as grand things as I’m hoping for.