Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

noisemademedoit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#21

Post by babuskov »

Sharlin wrote: post #19
babuskov wrote: post #18

Any sound slowed 700% is creepy. It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds, while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger.

No, this is stretched 700% without affecting the pitch: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

I listened to it again, you're right. Sounds like a horror movie theme, maybe that's what gives the creeps. Although I have to agree with many others in this thread: it isn't that creepy, I heard much better ones.

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#22

Post by raverbashing »

babuskov wrote: post #18

Any sound slowed 700% is creepy. It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds, while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger.

". It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds"

Not really, children wailing, nails on a blackboard and other high sounds are very bothersome

Yes, some high sounds are friendly, but not all

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#26

Post by cheald »

jawns wrote: post #24

If I slow something 50%, I would expect its speed to be halved. If I slow something 100%, I would expect its speed to be zero. Not quite sure how you can slow something by more than 100%.

100% slowdown ("streched to 100% as long") would be half the speed. "Slowed down 700%" in this case means "stretched to 700% of its original duration".

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#27

Post by jrockway »

timdorr wrote: post #10
lsb wrote: post #2

This is rather disappointing. The dial-up modem sound is digitally created, and a digital lengthening of each tone is much higher quality.

Yeah, they're attempting to do a time shift with some sort of echo-y dithering going on. Since it's digital, no dithering is needed!

Indeed. The sound starts off with a dialtone slowed down 700x but pitch adjusted. Guess what, that's exactly equivalent to the real dialone. (Instead of recording it for 1 second, you record it for 700 seconds.)

This rest of the video continues in the same manner. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#28

Post by TeMPOraL »

babuskov wrote: post #18

Any sound slowed 700% is creepy. It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds, while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger.

> while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger

Except most of the creepy parts here are high-pitch, not low-pitch sounds?

Re: Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy

#29

Post by Goladus »

dag11 wrote: post #8

Not creepy.

I agree but it does sound like music used by movies intended to evoke creepiness. It's because it sounds unnatural, far outside what we're used to hearing. Compare with, say, the Blaster Beam used by Jerry Goldsmith in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Beam
Post reply on HN