this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Music Production

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Seems like it can make something sound more stifled or claustrophobic

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Well, then it becomes a different phenomena because some aspect of the signal alteration is now dependent upon time and is being actively modulated in some sense over time.

To use another example a purely digital compressor with no color distortion is nothing more than a volume knob automated to change over time, nothing magical was done to the volume knob to turn it into a compressor, rather a set of complex automation parameters were defined so you don't have to sit there with a fader at a mixing board and manually raise and lower the volume of tracks to an obsessive degree. If I sound like I am bashing digital compressors I am not, this is what makes digital compressors so powerful and ubiquitious.

From a digital production sense, you don't really alter time ever, the production of the song you are making must all be unified to a single click track/specification of time passing. Altering time like you say would be something like playing a sample faster or slower.. but you are always altering a sound's relationship to your established sense of time, never speeding up or slowing down the clock in your DAW because that would break the whole system at a basic level. The high fidelity digital music production provides is possible precisely because a computer can keep a clock running very consistently, and an entire music production process can be stacked on top of that single clock/perspective on time.

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Right but in an aural sense in terms of how a human would perceive it changing time, not necessarily in a technical objective computer sense

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean, give me an equalizer and super fast jazz hands and I can emulate any purely subtractive effect upon a signal using just the equalizer and modulating cuts and boosts.

My favorite practical tool for this kind of thing is Toky Dawn Record's Nova Vst. There is a great free version but the paid version is still a massive bargain for how good the signal processing is. The basic idea of Nova is a visual equalizer that you can turn static cuts and boosts into dynamically responding cuts and boosts... i.e. the equalizer becomes a compressor.

https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1CHFv4mWQYM

In general, the philosophy of seeing the creation of sound as taking a process of taking a rich signal and removing from it in one way or another is called "Subtractive Synthesis" and there is a very good reason it is one of the most prolific and celebrated kinds of digital synthesis techniques. It is a very powerful way to look at the process of synthesizing sound.