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Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:29 am
by dogmancar
So I already saw a post on here about binaural beats. I figured though that I'd bring up isochronic tones and discuss the possibility of incorporating them into dubstep.

Isochronic tones are single notes that are chopped into a steady beats usually between 1 and 30hz. They performer a similar functions to binaural beats however binaural beats require stereo headphones (so they wouldn't work too well in the club).

The effects of the isochronic tone depends on the HZ raiting of the beat 0-4 sleep 4-8 half awake/dreamy 8-13 relaxed/meditative 13-30 normal consciousness/mathematical thinking. HZ=cycles per second

So I figured I could try incorporating isochronic tones into a dubstep song. If we are going by the tempo of 140 then 16th notes would be 9.3333 HZ which could in theory chill the audience out or if paired with a heavy wobble make them feel disoriented or strange. This is however just in theory. The way I went about creating the tone was by simply having a droning G and then sending a 16th note synced LFO (sine wave) to the channel volume for that sound. I've begun to also add bass and drum parts with as many notes lining up with the 16th note beat as is possible while still sounding musical.

I think it would be really cool to hear some ideas from you guys on what could make an isochronic dubstep track work, and maybe some of you guys would like to try it out too. It would be awesome to hear some cool tracks spawned from this idea even if it doesn't work out for me.

Also sorry for any grammatical or spelling errors I may have had.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:33 am
by Blaster
this sounds cool as fuck. Big up Reason user! im going to get started on some isochronics right now

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:52 am
by drake89
Good luck finding an infrasonic sound system.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 4:03 am
by dogmancar
Blaster: Sweet man post it here when you're done man.

drake89: You don't need an infrasonic sound system sou're not creating a tone at a 9.333HZ rating you're creating a normal tone and chopping it into 9.333HZ beats. If you had a normal note and chopped it into 9.333 beats per second then it would be a 9.333HZ isochronic tone.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 5:43 am
by dogmancar
Oh and one more thing I forgot to mention is that for isochronic tones to have a noticeable effect the song should probably be fairly long at least 6 or 7 minutes if not more and the isochronic tone should repeat unchanging for the entire song while everything else is going on. This is a big challenge for me because keeping a song interesting for six minutes while maintaining the same sixteenth note isochronic tone for the entire song is very difficult, at least for a dubstep noob like me.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 2:48 pm
by 3za
AM for hippies, count me in :6:

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:22 pm
by Foreplay
Im smoking some isochronic :T:

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:47 pm
by samkablaam
dogmancar wrote:Blaster: Sweet man post it here when you're done man.

drake89: You don't need an infrasonic sound system sou're not creating a tone at a 9.333HZ rating you're creating a normal tone and chopping it into 9.333HZ beats. If you had a normal note and chopped it into 9.333 beats per second then it would be a 9.333HZ isochronic tone.
its not exactly the same, but your speaker still needs to be able to act on a 9 Hz beat.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:40 am
by hifi
damn, never heard of isochronic tones before.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 10:17 am
by ARTFX
samkablaam wrote:
dogmancar wrote:Blaster: Sweet man post it here when you're done man.

drake89: You don't need an infrasonic sound system sou're not creating a tone at a 9.333HZ rating you're creating a normal tone and chopping it into 9.333HZ beats. If you had a normal note and chopped it into 9.333 beats per second then it would be a 9.333HZ isochronic tone.
its not exactly the same, but your speaker still needs to be able to act on a 9 Hz beat.
Almost all speakers can do that, the amount of HZ in this stands for the speed of the beat instead of the pitch.
So if I remember well you could make a very high pitched isochronic tone having a speed of 9Hz, which means that the speed is very slow.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 12:40 am
by dogmancar
ARTFX wrote:
samkablaam wrote:
dogmancar wrote:Blaster: Sweet man post it here when you're done man.

drake89: You don't need an infrasonic sound system sou're not creating a tone at a 9.333HZ rating you're creating a normal tone and chopping it into 9.333HZ beats. If you had a normal note and chopped it into 9.333 beats per second then it would be a 9.333HZ isochronic tone.
its not exactly the same, but your speaker still needs to be able to act on a 9 Hz beat.
Almost all speakers can do that, the amount of HZ in this stands for the speed of the beat instead of the pitch.
So if I remember well you could make a very high pitched isochronic tone having a speed of 9Hz, which means that the speed is very slow.
Thank you for helping to clarify my point.

HZ doesn't always mean pitch, it means cycles per second and can apply to anything. If a camera created video at say 30 frames per second then it could be said that it had a video capture rating of 30HZ.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 10:12 am
by BryceFury
Does know of any tracks that are an example of this?

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 4:08 pm
by drake89
I think there may be some in here, I posted this in make this sound a while back:

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 6:33 pm
by Augment
Would love to hear the results! :D

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 11:15 pm
by dogmancar
BryceFury wrote:Does know of any tracks that are an example of this?
I don't know of any dubstep tracks that use isochronic tones, as far as I know using them in dubstep or any form of edm is a new idea, but here is a simple example of an isochronic tone. Listen for the constant beating sound in the audio sample buried underneath the other sounds that's the isochronic tone.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 7:09 am
by Manic Harmonic
wait... so you can use isochronic tones to essentially have the same affect as binaural beats except without headphones? trippy as fuck man, i use those all the time for mediation and sleep purposes.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 4:00 pm
by dogmancar
Manic Harmonic wrote:wait... so you can use isochronic tones to essentially have the same affect as binaural beats except without headphones? trippy as fuck man, i use those all the time for mediation and sleep purposes.
Yeah pretty much. I've heard some people prefer isochronic actually even though its lesser known. Of course I prefer binaural a little bit because I'm better acquainted with it, but the no headphones thing means isochronics could work well in dubstep.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 8:09 am
by Manic Harmonic
wow thats epic as shit. I've always thought about putting some of those "digital drug" binaural things in the background of a song (who knows if they actually work), or one of those positive thinking or happy thought ones, so that everyone that listens to it on headphones will think its way better than it sctually is.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 4:45 am
by dogmancar
Manic Harmonic wrote:wow thats epic as shit. I've always thought about putting some of those "digital drug" binaural things in the background of a song (who knows if they actually work), or one of those positive thinking or happy thought ones, so that everyone that listens to it on headphones will think its way better than it sctually is.
Binaural beats aren't that hard, just create two pure sine waves, pan them to opposite sides, and detune one slightly. The further apart the quicker the beat. Companies like i-doser just want it to seem like its more complicated than it is.

Anyway you should try the isochronics out. I'm really digging the track in your signature and I'd love to hear what you come up with.

Re: Isochronic tones

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 5:43 am
by Manic Harmonic
yeah im definately gonna give it a go on my next instrumental. i don't know what you're talking about with the two sine waves though, it's my understanding that it's a little more complex than that. I mean yes obviously two sine waves but doesn't each one have to be a specific frequency to properly stimulate the alpha/beta/delta waves, etc? I just know that the ones i have listening to are two distinctly different tones oscillating at different rates.