Taken from a 60 minute tutorial from 2020. The full video + loads more can be found by joining the Producer tier on our Patreon 🎛

Nik designing the loudest tea slurp ever 🔊🔊🔊

For those willing to dig the subject : the "fire synapse at the same rate" phenomenon is called phase-locking (of nerve firings), and is the pillar of the temporal theory of pitch perception. It is the main thing that helps us to accurately identify pitch. Phase locking works until past 4-5 kHz, where we lose pitch accuracy. The missing fundamental phenomenon can be explained by the temporal theory as said in the video, because the auditory nerve phase locks to the fundamental anyway. Our auditory nerve is really good at doing maths ;)

when noisia talks production, its probably wise to listen. absolute legends

Welcome back to science with Nik

Bass tutorials are usually some dude fiddling with Serum knobs to show what you should do to make a bass sound "fat". Here's Nik talking for 10 minutes over an EQ screenshot about how your brain processes bass sounds and how scientists found out that the brains of owls can synthesize fundamentals by listening to harmonics. Absolute legend.

Maybe this explains why we can remember melodies so well

So instead of recording my instruments DI, I record them TO (Through Owl) nowadays, and oh boy, it gives such a nice and warm hoot to your lowend!

Never before has patreon been so tempting 😂

Nik is the best producer on Earth (for me) 🙌🙌

NOSIA VISION is the real deal, glad to see yet again great production minds sharing their knowledge 🕉

nik is a brilliant explainer and doesn't talk down at all, he just gives the best words he has to describe what he knows, which of course is a lot, it's always cool hearing him talk about what he knows

never knew how to explain but that's exactly what i like about bass. thr correlation between feeling the sub and hearing the bass not just adding one on another.

This is super informative! My production will never be the same after watched this. And it's coming from the legend himself! Thanks a lot for this!

Some music theory from what you said about harmonics and owls : Let say your brain predicts what's gonna happen next when it listens to music. If the predictions match the heard tune, it means you are spotting and learning music's structure and patterns. Now let say the producer first adds the repetitive patterns so you get the structure and then the brain starts to have more and more accurate predictions, but then the producers slighly twists something in the patterns (like removing the 45hz bass) so there's a distortion between what you hear and what you synthetized - if your brain likes surprizes, we should be able to record dopamine flux variations in the basal glands. If such a study ever exists, we might actually understand the mechanisms of why we love music. We could also understand why some people love some kind of music or sounds, etc.

Hearing is such an incredible thing, that we've all evolved over millenia to be able to distinguish sounds as a survival mechanism, and that instinct trancends species. Definitely going to be checking out this book, thanks for the tip!

Because of this video, I’m 100% subscribing to the patreon. This is invaluable!

i have This Is Your Brain On Music sitting next to me .. never heard of anyone as fascinated by it as me. plus i love your music - you the man!

This was mind blowing. And what a great guy for sharing the fundamentals, and the nuance he's learnt over the years. He clearly understands the importance of sharing your knowledge with anyone who wants it. It pushes the genre, building it's popularity and reach. Whatever secret sauce he loses is irrelevant. A self centred artist would hoard the knowledge to keep an edge over others - to remain popular. There's no ego in him - he truly loves the music and the d&b scene and is giving away an ocean of knowledge to ensure we all get to hear what becomes a reality as others add to the ultimate toolkit.. We all win. Listen to the best jungle from back in the day and imagine taking what's possible now, back in time, and playing it next to those old tunes... You would literally melt people's brains if you could show them where we are at today 😂 New tracks have such a profound effect on me these days that many epic D&B drops bring literal tears to my eyes when they first drop. What other style or genre gives you goosebumps so consistently. All because some dudes in the UK accidentally put their breaks records on at the wrong RPM and thought, "hang on, I like the sound of that" 😅

always great videos! thanks for all the info

Great video!

This is why my production name is science the sound it’s this stuff that gets me inspired

in the very well understandable book by Robert Jourdain "the well-tempered brain" we read that the physically resonating part of the inner ear responsible for these calculations, called residuum or residual hearing is built like an inverted concert grand piano - for the shape and proportions of these tiny ciliated hairs, whose distances to each other, but also length growth rates are staggered in such a way that they lie significantly in the golden ratio. If we think about this as a musical concept, our brain can't help but fall in love with all sorts of mixolydian scales. The sound researcher and multi-instrumentalist Joachim Ernst Berendt (1922-2000) reports in his book "Nada Brahma - Die Welt ist Klang" about an experimental arrangement in which the modulations of the earth's magnetic field, caused by the impinging solar storms, were recorded over a longer period of time on different points around the globe. The later resynthesized sound, transposed into the audible range, was in no way inferior to an 8-voice fugue by Bach in terms of counterpoint, harmony and quasi-periodicity - translinking on this very point the owls with headphones and the planet as an instrument, played by the sun.

Totally with you, Nik. As a matter if fact, i think I'll re-sub to NOISiA Patron to finish this lesson.

harmonics are amazing and thats the bottom line, just amazing... again its amazing.

Such a good piece of info!

beautiful video. thank youfor sharing!

Very interesting, thank you for sharing!

rocking the fubar shirt too, very nice

The knowledge from the don itself.

@adamneely - Nik is one of the most prolific drum and bass producers around doing an analysis into bass. Would love to hear your take on all of this.

Yo we need more of those type of video

I've waited my entire life for this video. I've had to do so much fuckery with the bass to untrick my brain from hearing the sub from the harmonics that I no longer no what is real. This Is Your Brain On Music is my favorite book. I've read it so many times since highschool. Greatly Recommend!

The owl bit is great. Sound is just energy and passes through all things.

used that in one of my tracks to make the fundamental shift over time so the bass is kinda different everytime you hear it while still maintaining a linear phase sub etc (track is called Indifference)

"Bass" is just a description/label of a frequency band. What you are describing is the limitless capabilities of the electronic musician's arsenal.

Sick 🙌🏼

The 2nd slide with the brain at the top and the harmonic tier almost reminds me of the cerebral spinal system.

Wow, thata intresting!

ugh, so good

Awesome! Love this. Can you upload the rest please 🙏

I'm ecstatic that hes wearing Tsuruda - FUBAR merch. Super cool stuff in that EP

Next level harmonic layering: tuning with Just Intonation! Pretty much all music we listen to nowadays is (deliberately) slightly out of tune, as a compromise. Imagine instead that if you made this powerful, harmonically rich bass, every other sound you then layered over top of it also aligned with its harmonics! My fav JI teacher has been Zhea Erose, check her out. I'd love to hear the members of Noisia explore alternate tuning systems in their individual music going forward.

Been getting lots of guided meditation background where they artfully place some low binaural beat within the actually composition where the science also suggested the same line of thought with this one. Might need to subscribe and watch the whole thing. Thank you for the teaser.

amazing...thanks!

Amazing video

COOL! THANK YOU!)

9:35 I think that's quite interesting too. After the first 4 octaves in the harmonic series, things get almost all mathematical, yet even though many harmonics don't land on "notes," the brain still hears the music. When studying "Deep Down," I noticed the first two notes of the three note main sequence were both F0, but the first F0 started on the 6th harmonic (C) and the second F0 on the 4th harmonic (F). This was the start of a month-long+ fascination with creating different chords and melodies uisng the harmonics of a fundamental without neccessarilly including the fundamental and is still something I push the boundaries of often. Many thanks to you guys for not only the video lessons but the lessons in your music.

I want one of these owl sub bass resynthesis engines now... an owl with headphones is going to take up a lot of rack space though.

That shit about the animals being able to recreate the fundamental frequencies just like humans is mind blowing. Honestly what's even more mind blowing is the fact that scientist were able to recreate what the owls brain was hearing compared to what was actually being played... like wtf.

great stuff

Producers assemble!! Nik is back 🤫🤫🤫

I need the natural analog owl resynthesis plugin for my projects lol

Owl pass filter! 😂

I haven't clicked a thumbnail as fast as today. as fast as my brain and brawn could allow me. Broke my fingwer

That's a great book 👍

Heckin dope

One of the best music theory videos I've ever seen :) I've had the biggest problem with bass my whole life. What kind of as low budget headphones with true bass, suitable for development would you recommend? Thanks!

Why do I feel like there is someone just off camera with a gun trained on my man nik? Great video, great information, much love

bass appreciation video

what i was so into this i didnt relize this was on patreon

thx

very interesting and this must prove how our minds can be hi jacked by advertising campaigns and negative things we see and hear on radio, social media and news channels to make us do things that we might not other wise do, or think.

Please, more

I hope one day you guys show us how you made that Dead Limit Reece

I’m going to patron

I imagine this because people keep saying the Korn bassist sounds so good but I couldn't hear it. Thought I was have def I start to see what they where when I experiment with sytrus n fm8 😊

so little views for people that have such deep and icredible knowledge. I will use these tools and become better.

but how do we tune the out-of-key harmonics when going across different notes with the bassline?

'The brain does it for you!' Funny how Nik talks about 'brain' and 'you' as if they're separate entities lol

Noisia tutorial are so fucking cool

That glass is comically huge

Amazing video and really cool stuff, thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. If I may make a little suggestion: Please turn your head away from the mic when you drink/slurp/swallow

my boy waxed up!

The sips of coffee 💀

As a non-music producer, I'm gonna get the patreon

So in theory if you stack chords oover and over eventually become its own extra tone , like a bass here? that is how frequencies work. the visual equivalent to portray this phenomena as i understand it would be a Fractal, sort of. where small part create bigger parts infinetly bigger /higher and infinetely smaller/lower. Any frequency /harmonics/sound is composed of smaller frequencies/harmonics

Exactly why In Bass We Trust. And love. Bass is the best ❤

My ears have been getting more and more sensitive to harmonics, especially that 5th harmonic on a fat bass, but any overtone up to absurd freqs may apply, it's a weird blurry line. It can be a huge issue when a fat bass starts to dictate the harmony that can be played on top, or at least how that ends up sounding. Would you consider doing a video on this? I've yet to have found much input from anyone, we seem to just wing it by ear. Can sound super cool to tune certain harmonics or replace them with sines btw.! Harmor is cool for this, with it's harmonic prism. Any sample synth can just be fed a huge organ-like collection of sines that mimic the structure of the harmonic series! Can keep some perfect ratios.

that's me going around listening some shit on my broken only-right-side-earpiece-left-headphones constructing what is left

huge

Do an Owl Bass tutorial!

*Weird knowledge increased* pretty awesome indeed, so this explains why music brings more people together than visual art? Oh I guess I already knew this from DJ JDAs classic if you know what I mean 😂

I'm here after buying the Noise 4x plugin and searching on youtube about it. that plugin is crazy good and now I see why. If the level of detail here was put into working on that plugin then no wonder its the best thing I could get my hands on for recreating sounds starting out.

The latest trend in sound design: owl-based synthesis xD

As a simple creative exercise, try creating a synth voice that sounds like a bear or lion roaring, then go from there.

There's a funny trend with electronic music producers who record tutorials. They sound like they have the driest throat ever and their mics and good acoustics pick up every detail of it lol

So interesting and fascinating !!! Thank you Dude. Take your time before the video take and drink before to be more relaxed. :) You explain very well. You have a big potential in teaching and sharing your big knowledge ! Thanks anyway. Peace

wow, this is classified stuff!

listening to this guy, makes you more humble

😮

I'm going to finish this video then I'm going to search the experiment where I can see owls with headphones on 🙂

I need to see the owls with headphones on. I. HAVE. TO. SEE. THE. OWLS.

The "realdubstep" people need to learn this. There are more mid harmonics with witch time sculpt in the mids, when the synth pitch is sub bass, so don't obsess over the low end only.

Did he say he was experimenting on owls? O_o I think it was more interesting than the topic itself

in an environment a brain needs to map sounds to objects, the ability to identify related harmonic content seems benificial

A cup!! Of tea damn dude forget the harmonics let's talk about that pint of tea hahaha

Slurp

Is that a jar of pasta sauce in the diffuser on the wall up there?

!!!