I’m still not done, but I swear this one won’t be obnoxiously long.
Let’s try to isolate some of this ultrasonic sound and shift it back into sonic territory.
The first thing I did was open this up in Audacity, then click Effect > EQ and Filter > High Pass Filter. I selected 24000Hz with a rolloff of -48Hz and hit enter.
That turned this
into this
What does it sound like? Nothing, as intended! Here’s the graph of this file:
Nothing below 24kHz, just as we intended. Now let’s shift all this noise down into a frequency that we can hear.
Next I hit Tools > Nyquist Prompt and entered this:
(mult *track* (hzosc 24000))
Now I get something like this in Audacity:
It doesn’t look much different, but I can assure you that it sounds different. What do I hear?
Well I can say that it sounds sort of like Asrun Dream if you squint your ears hard enough. See this region I circled in the original graph? Take a quick guess at what you think it might be:
It’s a vocal filter applied on Gackt during the verse which pokes up into the ultrasonic range!
You know what else I hear a lot of? Percussion. Very tinny, faint percussion! This is along with what sounds like cicadas chirping, a few audio scratches, and a lot of white noise. This is what that noise shifted down into the audio range looks like:
The blue indicates it’s quiet as hell, and indeed I have to max out the volume in Audacity to hear it. In comparison, I accidentally played Asrun Dream in Audacity at full volume and my wife could hear it across the house (don’t worry, I took the headset off first)!
I literally care about none of this noise. None of it is musical. Anyone claiming they can hear this is full of shit.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen below.
It’s so not musical that YouTube’s Content ID System didn’t pick this up. Take that for whatever it’s worth. However, this extra information does add to the frequencies that we can hear and to our perception of the music, however slight. And you can hear a ton of audio imperfections that would be a nuisance to listen to if it was actually audible at sonic frequencies!