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slowdown phenomenon


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So I go running with my iPod. On this iPod I have a couple of my songs and when they come on, something weird happens. I suddenly perceive them as extreeemely slow. I don't notice this slowdown with tunes that aren't mine, which makes the whole thing weirder. I wrote it off the first four or five times but now I'm sure of it.. I'm perceiving those songs with a much slower BPM than normal.

It makes me want to hop into FL and fix them, but I don't know if it's just a sensation during exercise or something real. I'm a pretty lethargic person in real life, so maybe day-to-day I do perceive time more slowly than others? I tried looking for similar phenomena elsewhere online but came up with nothing.

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Very good chance the excercise is slightly changing your perception of what you hear. A variety of physical changes will occur in your body as you excercise. depending on the type of excercise you are doing it can also have a strong impact on your brain waves. If you feel good when you excercise that's Alpha brainwaves. If you are pushing it and doing a sprint or something like that, Beta, which is responsible for our "get out or die" mode.

There could be a variety of factors making you perceive the music as slower than usual but it's a safe bet that some physical exertion is livening up your senses and making you hear things a bit differently. Combine that with moment to moment changes in your attitude, chemical changes in your body, the source of the sound bouncing up and down, and your own rhythm you established while running and you end up with a very volatile environment for listening. Probably not the best way to critique your own mixes. :) Waiting until after you run, maybe.

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It should be a fairly common occurrence that you notice music speeds don't always sound right in your head - particularly if you're listening to a slower paced song after an hour of faster music and vice versa.

I don't know any of the science behind it, but carry a 20lb weight around for an hour, put it down and be amazed how much lighter everything seems to weight after that when you pick something else up. It's the same basic thing I think.

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It's probably got something to do with your inner rhythm, at least the one you use for moving your body when running. Do you notice the same difference in tempo when you aren't running, comparing them to the same tracks while at your computer?

It could also have something to do with whatever endorphins and adrenaline your body produces while running screwing with your experience of time.

Run with a metronome. :D

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It's probably got something to do with your inner rhythm, at least the one you use for moving your body when running. Do you notice the same difference in tempo when you aren't running, comparing them to the same tracks while at your computer?

It could also have something to do with whatever endorphins and adrenaline your body produces while running screwing with your experience of time.

Run with a metronome. :D

No mayn, the tempos sound regular when I'm not running.

I think I'm just magical. The faster I run, the slower things around me move. I need to harness this power to steal food at drive-throughs.

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I've experienced this multiple times, and I can duplicate it every time after I go running. I've confirmed that the CD player in my car (where I initially ran into this weird occurrence) works just fine. One day I was playing music that contains a bass note that doesn't change, and it sounded just fine prior to me going out for a run. After running 3 miles, I went back into my car and played the exact same music. Not only did it sound slightly slower, but the pitch of the bass was a whole step lower!! To this date, I have absolutely no idea why this happens, other than the fact I completed running. Once my body cooled and my heart rate was back to normal, the music sounded just like it did before I went running. Very interesting indeed!

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I guess you gaiz have a point, but I'm disappointed that noone experiences exactly what I do. It's actually a really profound difference in tempo. Either you guys have higher quality brains or you don't ever go running :]

Here's the thing. They are, of course, your tunes, so when you're running, your body is operating faster, so to speak. Heartrate is up, Alpha and/or Beta waves in the brain are in motion, and because they are your tunes, you expect them to be as fast as your body feels in motion. In your head, the song will play back 'faster' because your body is well, operating faster. So when the song plays and it's not up to the subconscious expectation, it seems slower, and the 'slowdown' will be more pronounced the more intense the exercise is. I know what you'e talking about because this happens to me from time to time, albeit very rarely.

Adrenaline does have a part in this, yes. But it's mostly a mental thing.

Now, as Rozo is hinting to, running with a metronome? I believe the metronome will match your song tempo either way, although I've never really tried it and I'm not sure what the result would be.

And Modus, you're not magical. :-D One of the effects of adrenaline on the body is that time seems to go a little slower. This is usually a part of the fear auto-mechanism ( for example with a poisonous snake: snake hisses and rattles tail, fear rises, adrenaline begins to flow, heart rate speeds up, body's reaction time speeds up, perception of time slows down slightly). Those last two are closely connected, and is affecting the 'tempo' of your own work. The reason only your music is being affected is because, well, it's yours. You "know" how it's supposed to sound in your head (because it's your own creation- you made it from start to finish), and when the adrenaline starts pumping, your internal metronome speeds up but the song doesn't, so it plays back 'slower'.

I think I just reiterated myself somewhere.

tl;dr it's all in your head. your body's chemicals are screwing with you

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Try listening to songs right after you wake up...oh man, they sound so loud, and fast!

Somewhat distantly related is the phenomenon where when you first shift vision to a clock, the first second that passes seems to be stretched/longer than the rest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis

The most prominent example of tempo perception being off that I have is that I have two versions of the same song:

The first version is at a faster tempo, and slows down at the end. The second version is at a slower tempo, and has no slowdown at the end. Now, the first version is the original version of the song, and I've listened to it a bunch more, so my mind has gotten used to it. The effect is that when I listen to the ending of the second one, I =expect= the slowdown, and when it doesn't happen, my mind actually perceives the tempo as =speeding up=! It's super weird!

Another thing: I did a song for a dance choreography once--everyone kept swearing that at the climax where it went up to a higher key, the song got faster too, but of course, that was just a mental thing....more excitement/higher key sounds like it's going faster (plus, that part of the choreo was more complicated, so we probably felt like we were getting behind, and perceived it as the track speeding ahead of us).

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had another psychoacoustic phenomenon happen tonight. I'm sitting at my desk in the dead of night, headphones in, just going through my WIPs trying to pick out ones to work on. I find a sort of a downtempo one and start chiseling its soundscape, but as soon as I play back my first change, I feel a sort of... chill, on my back.

I'm not really the sort of guy that gets spooked out of the blue, but there was just this odd feeling that something was behind me. I stopped playing the track and the sensation immediately went away. Now I've accidentally made sounds resembling human speech before, but it was overt enough for me to be like "lolol, that sounds like a person" This time it was just pure sensation with no obvious source. It was just weird because I didn't intentionally try to make anything spooky. I tried to ignore the feeling and keep working, but my brain was just screaming brah there's something behind you brah you better check it out.

So obviously, that WIP is still a WIP. Thanks subconscious mind, you asshole.

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I had another psychoacoustic phenomenon happen tonight. I'm sitting at my desk in the dead of night, headphones in, just going through my WIPs trying to pick out ones to work on. I find a sort of a downtempo one and start chiseling its soundscape, but as soon as I play back my first change, I feel a sort of... chill, on my back.

I'm not really the sort of guy that gets spooked out of the blue, but there was just this odd feeling that something was behind me. I stopped playing the track and the sensation immediately went away. Now I've accidentally made sounds resembling human speech before, but it was overt enough for me to be like "lolol, that sounds like a person" This time it was just pure sensation with no obvious source. It was just weird because I didn't intentionally try to make anything spooky. I tried to ignore the feeling and keep working, but my brain was just screaming brah there's something behind you brah you better check it out.

So obviously, that WIP is still a WIP. Thanks subconscious mind, you asshole.

My advice? save that preset for a rainy day and a very dark remix
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