A very long, seamless loop of phaser-like sound recreated using Analog Box and Cool Edit Pro. The Analog Box circuit was designed to create phaser-like sounds from the original Star Trek series, but in this case, I adjusted the settings very differently and used frequencies higher than were typically used in the series (why? because it sounds "good" to me). I then used Cool Edit Pro: FFT filtering to extract the lower range -> distortion -> looped dynamic delay -> mixed back over original -> channel mixed to adjust stereo spread. This is more phaser than anyone can stand, so the fact that it is a seamless loop is probably overkill. But, you can re-sample this to get different tonality. For example, it starts at 44100 Hz so if you treat it as though it were 38000 you get lower tones. If you go down to 11000 (1/4 speed) or so, you get a rather different sort of background noise that is still very complex and sci-fi sounding. I originally named this PhaserContinuous5_STTOS_recreated, but since I was not actually trying to recreate any sound from the series directly, I decided to take out the "recreated", so I changed that to Loop here. Its the kind of sound that a phaser could have had in one episode or another, but I think it was generally closer to 45% of the main frequencies I used here. As with any phaser-like sound, this is way too annoying to listen to it for very long.
Type
Wave (.wav)
Duration
0:25.216
File size
3.8 MB
Sample rate
40000.0 Hz
Bit depth
16 bit
Channels
Stereo
Comments
2 years, 9 months ago
The sample rate is crucial to the sound quality. To better understand the importance of the sampling rate we need to have an understanding of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. In short it states that perfect reconstruction of a signal is possible when the sampling frequency is greater than twice the maximum frequency of the signal being sampled. So in the case of audio, since the humans can hear up to sounds of 20kHz, a 40kHz sample rate allows for perfect reconstruction of the original signal. Nevertheless the standard is not 40kHz but 44100 Hz as explained below
6 years, 7 months ago
...and by the way, I can't help but believe the same original mechanism (hacked B3?) was used to create many such different sounds in ST:TOS, but of course I'm doing it digitally here with "Analog Box 2".
6 years, 7 months ago
Thanks for the detailed comments; complex modulations do lend themselves to rate-change and pitch-change experimentation (and you can find some being done, but with sub-components of the sound generation, in PhaserVariations2,3,4a in my SciFi pack).
6 years, 7 months ago
While super annoying when looped, it does make great trek sounds when changing the pitch. For example, playing at a sampling rate of 10000Hz sounds reminiscent of the sick bay drone. Using SoX you can hear it like this:
play -r 10k *zimbot*phaser*.wav5000Hz sounds like the engine noise of a probe as it passes by.
play -r 5000 *zimbot*phaser*.wavDifferent interesting sounds can be made by altering the pitch but not the rate. For example, you can hear the sound of a giant tribble, purring contentedly:
play *zimbot*phaser*.wav pitch -5000Or, try a pitch bend or two for a mind altering sci-fi swoop as the engines kick into low gear for a sudden acceleration, and then speed away, leaving behind only the sound of your ship's dilithium crystals ringing at their harmonic frequency:
play *phaser*.wav bend 0,-6000,1 bend 2,6000,1 fade h 1 6 3
