Psychoacoustic sounds

Psychoacoustic sound has exploded into everyones minds as of late due to the arrival of Spectrasonic’s latest ground breaking synth “Omnisphere“. However it’s fair to say that not everybody knows exactly what psychoacoustics is all about. I believe understanding this concept better can assist music artists produce their music with greater focus and interest. Psychoacoustics is a concept that was born around 1940-50’s with the introduction of the “Study of Human Perception” or the way that humans perceive sound.The human ear can hear 20hz - 20,000hz and is unbiased towards frequencies, however the brain receives all of this information at once but cannot focus on all of the frequencies at the same time, forcing the listener to focus in on particular frequencies e.g. Synth lead.

Therefore for the engineer, understanding the principals of psychoacoustics is understanding the relationship between man’s ability to perceive sound and sound creation itself. If you are to create sound on a new level you must first understand these two areas of study.

The benefits of implementing Pyschoacoustic techniques helps create sonic originality and can be used in two ways.

  1. Creating new sounds
  2. New methods of mixing (Storytelling)

Spectrasonics have used the principals of psychoacoustics to reveal hidden frequencies within organic sounds, and they have achieved this by re-focusing the listeners perception using various recording and synthsis techniques. watch

The psychoacoustics concept is a very powerful technique not only to create new sounds but also during the mixing process and especially within electronic music genres. This is because genres like trance and psytrance use a wide variety of sounds and sound stages. For example lets imagine that your listening to a beautiful atmosphere with soft tones and a cathedral type reverb that makes the track feel huge, a melody slowly bubbles out from underneath the atmosphere and begins to make you feel lighter and lighter and soon the track feels like outer space, full of lush sound. All of a sudden unexpectedly the track sucks inwards and instantly becomes tight and elastic with little or no reverb at all, with a definitive clarity and a rock solid groove.

Everytime I create a track, I work towards building drama, conditioning my target audience and forcing them to focus on prominent sounds allowing me to use misdirection and this great for surprising the dance floor. Remember the music you are inspired by? remember the first time you heard it? did it surprise you? were the sounds used unique?

Something else very interesting about the human brain is that it can sometimes “fill in” or create sounds that the ear never heard. If you have ever listened to a particular track closely and heard sounds that you can’t quite put your finger on? perhaps you hear these sounds within the fundamental groove or the etheral pads in the atmosphere of the track. Sounds that the brain cannot easily distinguish can trick our perception, leaving our inner imagination to pick up the tab.  

The music industry today is a cut throat business to be in especially if your the underdog, but like everyone will tell you “you’ve got to be different”. So how do we use psychoacoustics to create new sounds, create interest in our music and surprise the listener?

“DON’T BE LAZY”

Attention to detail is the only way your track will stand out, I’m telling you, if your one of those people who relies on presets and patches 100% then you will never go all the way. I mean it’s great playing with great presets and in some cases they might be just the right sound you need, but be assured that thousands of people have already heard that sound before. Have you ever been listening to the radio and said to yourself “That sounds familiar” and then you realise, that sound you hear is one of the very first presets in your Massive library!

Well now that I’ve got you all thinking about the deeper mechanics of sound production, I’ll put together a simple tutorial for you all to sink your teeth into.