This is something that’s been sitting on the hard drive for awhile. The evening before the last Producers Conference, the topic of the auditory illusion, known as the Shepard’s Tone, came up, so I took on the challenge of trying to recreate this effect in Reason. The sound is an ascending or descending scale that never seems to end. I made a couple of patches: one is a step sequencer based tone, and the other is simply an instrument based on the sine wave stack. I tried making the shepard-risset glissando, but this proved to be a bit more tedious, and I wasn’t successful. I think there’s a way to achieve it with some kind of simultaneous pitchbend and amp gain modulation to create the barber pole effect. But this will have to wait to another day when I have a bit more time.

Download the Shepard Tone Combi.zip

Ok, I’ve got to get back to re-wiring my workstation

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