So I played around with Shepard Tones some more. I’ve had various successful attempts and several more failures. I created a Shepard scale easily enough, basically it’s a chromatic scale that starts on a C3 playing 1 8th note, then 2 8th notes on the C# and carrying on on each key until you reach the C4 which you hit once. Playing this over 3 octaves so starting on C2, C3 and C4 and automating the volume of the lower octave up as it progresses through the scale and automating the the volume of the upper octave down tricks the ear into hearing a never ending scale. This was all well and good and easily achievable however as it’s a chromatic scale it’s not exactly the most musical and it’s not easy to hide in a song so I instead tried with sine waves. I used the ESX24 in Logic for this. Instead of playing a scale I simply automated the pitch up on the varying octaves so it was one single tone. This was unsuccessful, after spending 3 days watching tutorials and and trying to blend together the starts and ends of the files I gave in. The problem was that the sine waves frequency rate was different at the end of the clip to at the start so that when I tried to blend them together there was always a pop. I am still experimenting with making Shepard Tones however instead I simply opted to automate the pith over the duration of held notes.This is similar but doesn’t have the same effect sadly but it’s close enough for me to get across what I’m trying to do with the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLdxUsSAzDU – (I used an Ableton tutorial as the the principles are the same it’s just Logic had rubbish tutorial videos)