Presto Electro

A couple posts ago I talked about "clipping". More specifically I talked about how cool it sounded, and how hard it was to find an audio representation of it. Well guess what? I had some free time this evening and I put together a couple of mp3s for your education and benefit:

Sine Waves

I'll be honest with you: Sine waves are boring as heck to listen to. They don't have any harmonics at all, so the sound they make is really quite uninteresting. For the purposes of this experiment, I've synthesized an F Major chord to give this mp3 at least a little interest. The waveform below is a visual summary of the component parts of the chord. You may listen to them by clicking on the picture!

Even with the harmonizing it is still pretty tough to hear. Below, I've doubled the frequency (raised it an octave) so it is a lot easier to hear:

Clipped Sine Waves

Thank you for enduring the sine waves. Here comes the good part! This clipped sine wave sounds awesome, and I am sure you can imagine the kind of impact some careful clipping could lend to a guitar sound. PLEASE BEWARE!!! The clipped wave is MUCH easier to hear! If you turned your speakers/headphones up for the sine waves, turn 'em back down!

Visually, the clipped wave doesn't look like much of anything. It certainly doesn't seem like it would be very much more interesting than the others. But our ears process sound waves in a way that interprets the "corners" of the clipped wave as a bunch of sounds interfering with each other.

If you play these mp3s in anything with a graphic equalizer, you can see a visual representation of this phenomenon: The clipped wave show up over a much higher range of frequencies than the sine wave does. Here are some extremely scientific animated GIFs for the mp3-player impaired: