Lessons for your ears!
Those of us who work with audio processing get on a daily basis often refer to various forms of “distortion” that only we seem to be able to hear. You might hear us toss around all kinds of weird terms to describe these seemingly mythical sounds only we seem to hear when evaluating audio.
This page is designed as an audio class for your ears, because it is all about how to listen, and what to listen for.
We've chosen to isolate three of the most common terms you may hear us use in daily audio tech conversations, and attempt to show you what we hear. Listening to these files will also help with some of the audio concepts and terminology described in the Audio Processing 101 article.
You will notice some similarities in the effect. The terms used for these effects reference the "waveform shape", and distortion products produced.
We’ve taken a small piece of audio by Kevin MacLeod called "Broken Reality" to use for these demonstrations. We will use highly exaggerated processing to demonstrate concepts such as “harmonic Distortion”, “Pumping”, etc. Typically these effects appear in more subtle forms in real world audio...unless something malfunctions in some horrific manner!
Our first audio clip demonstrates our sample song as originally produced.
This next clip demonstrates "Harmonic Distortion".
We are now up to two audio clips which demonstrate “Intermodulation Distortion” also referred to as "inter-mod", or "IMD". Notice how the keyboard audio, snare, and cymbals in this clip sound somewhat “jagged” due to bass note activity.
This last clip demonstrates the phenomenon known as “pumping” notice how Keyboard notes “jump up and down” in level when the kick drum hits, and bass notes happen….
Enjoy!
