What makes an effect/patch "dreamy"/"dreamlike"?

[Mark Hammer]

...

I think we're getting somewhere. 

OK, now I'm intrigued. Where are we getting and what are we going to do when we get there. I don't wanna come unprepared.

Well, Andy, I guess the destination is to provide some basic perceptual design principles for the desired outcome.  As a psychologist, I think first in terms of what the effect does with respect to our thinking, perception, and attention.  These aren't just "sounds".  I can make different sounds by just turning the knobs on the amp or on the pedals I already have.  These are quarter twists to how we think about what we hear.  That said, it's a bit like saying "Hey, let's go for a trip to the country!" or "Let's go on vacation!".  There are a million directions one could go in from where you are.

In the early '80s, there was an article in either JASA or JAES, by Bernie Hutchins I believe, on what makes a synth sound "fat".  Keep in mind that the article was likely submitted to the journal a year or two earlier, as such things go.  And while 1981 or so was not the dark ages, it was well before many of the aspects of sample manipulation, aftertouch, velocity sensitivity, and other things we've become accustomed to, came into being, or at least were found in consumer-grade products.  So Bernie's question was in response to people's comments about this or that synth sounding "fat"; just what was it that people liked about that sound, and what sorts of manipulations resulted in that perception?

It's a long time ago, so don't quote me, but I think "fatness" maxed out at around 3-5 kinds of modulation imposed on a note.  NO modulation of any sort was what led to organs being labelled as bland-sounding and boring.  Once you got to around 5 or more sources of modulation (e.g., ADSR + LFO for amplitude and filter, and sub-octave fade-in), subjective evaluation went from "fat" to distracting and too busy.  The sound had to be just busy enough, but not too much.

I'm kind of aiming for the same sort of deconstruction here.  As for preparation, bring a change of clothes, and maybe a pillow.

[StephenGiles]

Dreamy is our greyhound's name, formerly known as Only Dreaming in her racing days!

[PRR]

>  If the repeats change over time, however, that tends to draw us in.

There is a piece, "Come Out To Show Them", c.1970 tape manipulation, which extracts 5 words from a news clip and repeats them many different ways in layers. XXXGoogle does not remember.XXX(*) It made a real impression on my young mind. It's not "pleasant dreams".

(*)XXX- helps if you spell it Reich. 1966.
https://www.google.com/search?%22Come+Out+To+Show+Them%22
Wikipedia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZUB5iSEifI

[jonny.reckless]

I love some of that late 60s Steven Reich stuff. I sometimes imagine what would have come out of a Reich / Pink Floyd collaboration in those days.

[Fancy Lime]

...

I think we're getting somewhere. 

OK, now I'm intrigued. Where are we getting and what are we going to do when we get there. I don't wanna come unprepared.

Well, Andy, I guess the destination is to provide some basic perceptual design principles for the desired outcome.  As a psychologist, I think first in terms of what the effect does with respect to our thinking, perception, and attention.  These aren't just "sounds".  I can make different sounds by just turning the knobs on the amp or on the pedals I already have.  These are quarter twists to how we think about what we hear.  That said, it's a bit like saying "Hey, let's go for a trip to the country!" or "Let's go on vacation!".  There are a million directions one could go in from where you are.

In the early '80s, there was an article in either JASA or JAES, by Bernie Hutchins I believe, on what makes a synth sound "fat".  Keep in mind that the article was likely submitted to the journal a year or two earlier, as such things go.  And while 1981 or so was not the dark ages, it was well before many of the aspects of sample manipulation, aftertouch, velocity sensitivity, and other things we've become accustomed to, came into being, or at least were found in consumer-grade products.  So Bernie's question was in response to people's comments about this or that synth sounding "fat"; just what was it that people liked about that sound, and what sorts of manipulations resulted in that perception?

It's a long time ago, so don't quote me, but I think "fatness" maxed out at around 3-5 kinds of modulation imposed on a note.  NO modulation of any sort was what led to organs being labelled as bland-sounding and boring.  Once you got to around 5 or more sources of modulation (e.g., ADSR + LFO for amplitude and filter, and sub-octave fade-in), subjective evaluation went from "fat" to distracting and too busy.  The sound had to be just busy enough, but not too much.

I'm kind of aiming for the same sort of deconstruction here.  As for preparation, bring a change of clothes, and maybe a pillow.

Mark, thank you for rebuilding my confidence in Canadian psychologists, which had suffered in recent years. But fortunately, a cider a day keeps the lobster away.

I think the statement about "fatness" holds true, at least to some degree, for "dreamyness" as well. Several slow-ish movements of tonal parameters (pitch, volume, filtering, stereo panning, time delay), which interfere with each other can give the false short-term impression of predictability but drift of in unpredictable waters over more iteratioins. The timescale of the wave forms created by the interference should probably be such that there seems to be no interference over short periods of time (a few oscillations of the LFOs) and it only becomes obvious over time scales that are significantly longer than our usual musical "groove attention span" of one or two bars. To that end, the involved LFOs should have a small offset of <10% in rate between them.

May I suggest a sleep talking pedal (name is taken by Jacque, unfortunately): Two parallel wah circuits driven by independent LFOs. I would use MFB filters or maybe bridged-T feedback filters, controlled by simple phase shift oscillators via vactrols or JFETs. That before some light overdrive, then a flanger with a reeeeealy slow rate, a delay and some reverb. You could probably fill 5 minutes of song by just slowly picking a simple chord progression a few times and reciting a beat poem about the existential dread of smoking filter-less cigarettes in the rain, or something along those lines.

Andy

[Mark Hammer]

>  If the repeats change over time, however, that tends to draw us in.

There is a piece, "Come Out To Show Them", c.1970 tape manipulation, which extracts 5 words from a news clip and repeats them many different ways in layers. XXXGoogle does not remember.XXX(*) It made a real impression on my young mind. It's not "pleasant dreams".

(*)XXX- helps if you spell it Reich. 1966.
https://www.google.com/search?%22Come+Out+To+Show+Them%22
Wikipedia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZUB5iSEifI

Love all that meditative stuff, Reich, Oliveros, Riley, Glass, Part.
A couple months ago, this thing happened on CBC radio.  I don't know if it was just local or system-wide.  One show ended and a several-second announcement came on for a comedy show after the news-on the-hour,  The announcement kept repeating (like "Come out") endlessly, like a loop.  It repeated several hundred times, replacing the entire newscast.  What was interesting was that the audio quality slowly degraded, until the residual hiss finally replaced the voice.  It wasn't tape, and the sort of quality degradation that occurs after 50-100 repeats.  It wasn't analog delay, because that would have degraded after a dozen repeats or so.  But it didn't have the lasting power of an encoded digital repeat.  So I don't know what the hell happened.  But 6 minutes later, you're listening to the same 10-12 spoken words that have gotten progressively harder to make out, unless you heard them 6 minutes ago before they got corrupted and the hiss slowly crept in.  It was the damnedest thing.

In any event, I confessed to a wide variety of crimes when it was done, and am awaiting sentencing.

[Digital Larry]

This is not so much dreamy as nightmarish, but I took a sample of a voice track I did for a corporate training video and ran it through an FV-1 with some type of "granular" thing going on.  By the end, it's pretty nuts.

https://soundclick.com/r/s7ts40

[EBK]

That reminds me of a few cool art pieces by Douglas Gordon that I saw several years back.  One was "24-hour Psycho", which was the Hitchcock classic "Psycho", slowed down to approximately 2 frames per second (obviously I didn't watch the whole thing).  The other was "through a looking glass" (I think that was the name of the piece), which featured mirror-image projections, facing each other, of the "You talkin' to me?" scene from "Taxi Driver", which slowly slip in and out of sync as they repeat over the course of an hour.

[Mark Hammer]

When I was a young teen, and AM radio was what you listened to music on, I would tune in to this late night Sunday jazz show from Rochester, NY on station WHAM, 1180 on the dial.  WWVA, one of the most powerful broadcast transmitters on the continent, is 1170khz on the AM dial.  A third station - I can't remember which - was slightly higher than 1180.  The jazz show itself was odd enough.  The jazz show announcer, Harry Abrahams, appeared to be the only person in the station at that time, covering all bases, and announcing himself in every role ("Next, Harry Abrahams with the weather.  Hi, Harry Abrahams here with a Rochester weather update.  Coming up next, Harry Abrahams with sports.")  I learned that his career eventually took a turn for the worse ( https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/columnists/memmott/2014/04/29/rochester-story-jazz-robbery/8475775/ ). 

In any event, from several hundred miles away, the radio reception was not good.  And, germanium transistor radios and AM being what they were at the time, reception drifted.  The two adjacent stations would run The Billy Graham Hour of Decision, but about 30 seconds out of sync.  So what I listened to was this constantly morphing thing that faded from Billy Graham ranting on about verily this and verily that, to Jimmy Smith or Jack McDuff playing these incredibly funky riffs to Billy Graham repeating what he had just said a little while ago back to the jazz organ tune, then to Billy, and back again, the cycle repeating until I wafted off to sleep.

You know, all through the '60s and '70s, I never felt the need or urge to try any "mind-expanding" substances.  Probably because all I needed for those same hallucinatory experiences was my little Mitsubishi 11-transistor radio.

[amz-fx]

[Steben]

Somehow Jimi's "Drifting" and early Pink Floyd stuff does it.

[ElectricDruid]

Somehow Jimi's "Drifting" and early Pink Floyd stuff does it.

Yes, I agree. "Julia Dream" and quite a lot of "Meddle" is pretty dreamy.

A lot of early Floyd is not what I'd describe as "dreamy". "Full-on psychedelic" is more like it. There's an intensity to that that I don't associated with dreams - they're more nebulous, harder to grasp. Early Floyd stuff like "Let there be more light" or "Interstellar Overdrive" sounds like some crazy engine of a rocket ship taking your mind to a distant galaxy. There's very much the sense of a powerful motor driving you forward.

I also agree about Jimi on "Drifting", but "Foxy Lady" to contrast sounds like a freight train going through a wall! Blew me away when I first heard it!

[bool]

What makes an effect/patch "dreamy"/"dreamlike"?

Well I'd say having a little delay turned on here and there .... and most importantly, getting the player properly hammered!

Haha, I'm sure you know the drill!

[deadastronaut]

.... and most importantly, getting the player properly hammered!

i'm going to try this.............................................again. 

[Mark Hammer]

.... and most importantly, getting the player properly hammered!

i'm going to try this.............................................again. 

Many years back, there was a guy doing his doctorate in math at Stanford Univ. who bludgeoned his dissertation supervisor to death with a ball peen hammer.  When he was eventually allowed out on parole, there was a restraining order against his being anywhere near Stanford campus.  His response was "They stole ten years of my life.  I don't think they should be able to do that with impunity."

I photocopied the newspaper article, and kept a few copies in my desk.  Whenever one of my fellow grad students was experiencing some difficulties with their supervisor I'd jokingly give them a copy of the article, and tell them "Just slide this under their office door after hours, to anonymously remind them that, like, you know, stuff happens."

But I don't think that's the "hammered" you meant.  At least I hope it isn't. 

[bool]

Oh, yeah ...

Hammer Marks the spot!

ha ha ha

[bluebunny]

But I don't think that's the "hammered" you meant.

"Hammered" means that our esteemed eponymous colleague has stopped by a thread and deposited a little nugget of wisdom.   

[Mark Hammer]

It is a strange world indeed, when jokes about criminal harrassment and threats of murder are construed as "wisdom".  But hey, if that's what's getting served up as compliments these days, I'll take it.  I'm not proud. 

[garcho]

I love music that dances around the threshold between alien and familiar, when you can make out shapes and movements that you recognize but they're askew in some fundamental ways. I think that's dreamy. Here's a dreamy record I've been listening to a lot. Plenty of processing units, not so much guitar, but it's still good music, I promise!

Amon Tobin's Long Stories

[PRR]

https://youtu.be/g1wVv-soLjc