Endlessly Rising Shepard Tone

After talking about the Shepard Tone, an audio illusion that can create an endlessly rising or falling scale, with my friend Ben Pender, I decided to try to create one using Lilypond. The result is quite interesting:

Chromatically rising Shepard Tone:

The midi file created by Lilypond: shepard_tone.midi

The Lilypond file used to render the above midi file: shepard_tone.ly

A wav file generated from the midi file above: shepard_tone.wav (43M)

An mp3 file generated from the wav file above:

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One Response to “Endlessly Rising Shepard Tone”

  1. Benjamin April 4, 2010 at 3:43 pm #

    Oh my,

    I was just playing around with Ableton Live and just searched shepards tone midi and there you were! two days in a row! haha

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