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Electronic Music Production Series

Composing Constant Urgency with Rising Ramps

Concepts, Tools & Techniques

Michael Filimowicz, PhD
Sound & Design
Published in
3 min readOct 9, 2021

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Our neurocognition encodes pitches, which are temporal differences (the rate of vibration cycles per second) as having a spatial sense of being ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘higher than/lower than’ relative to each other. Because of this spatial processing, a tone rising in pitch will connote a build in tension and the opposite is true: a tone falling in pitch feels like coming to rest.

The higher the pitch rises, it’s like we are leaving the ground and thus exposed to a perilous drop, while coming closer to ground via a lowering pitch implies less damage upon a hypothetical impact since the sense of distance to ground gradually decreases.

This can be used compositionally by embedding such pitches as background textures to impart this modulation of urgency into your composition. Here I’m not referencing Risers and Fallers as general transitional elements leading toward or away from The Drop, though these work with the same psychological mechanisms.

Rather, my interest with this case study is more about using rising tones in a more subtle manner where they don’t constitute a whole section of the track prior to or after The Drop.

Below are two risers, at 4-bar and 32-bar lengths:

These are at durational extremes from each other, since the 4-bar pattern will repeat regularly, twice within an 8-bar section, while the 32-bar pattern undergirds much longer sections. I also use these both at the same time by layering them, so their effects reinforce each other, for most (though not all) of my track Barn Burner, which you can listen to below to hear these rising ramps working their urgency feel at the background texture level:

The Shepard Tone

A more psycho-acoustic approach to rising tones is with the Shepard Tone illusion of an endlessly rising or falling pitch, which supposedly can cause anxiety and panic attacks (at this link you can also design your own Shepard Tone).

The Shepard Tone is an audio illusion that creates the feeling of consistent, never-ending rising/falling. The illusion is achieved by playing overlapping notes that are one octave apart. For this reason, it forms a Shepard Scale, each scale fading in and fading out so that the beginning or end of any given scale is indistinguishable. In this way, the sensation of rising or descending notes never ends.

• Traits of the Shepard Tone Illusion:

• Creates the illusion of continuous rising or falling notes or frequencies

• Achieved by simultaneously playing scales separated by one octave

• Scales are played at different volumes (source)

Here’s an example of a Shepard Tone:

Hans Zimmer used the Shepard Tone with musical instruments in his score for Dunkirk:

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