The Other Square Wave

Square waves are a lie

[Googahgee]

It doesn’t matter for how it sounds, but it DOES matter if you put the signal into a distortion stage. It will distort completely differently, because the peak levels of the phase shifted wave are a LOT higher compared to regular square wave as mentioned near the end of the video. Adding an allpass filter for phase shift is a really good technique for getting some varied sounds out of distortion or saturation later in the chain, try it out!

[McNibbler]

Amazing, I’ve been an electrical engineer for years and it never had even occurred to me that phase changes in the harmonics wouldn’t be perceivable in our ears.

[tyjuarez]

that "sideways" triangle wave could mean PHAT basslines without being overcompressed in mastering. psychoacoustics are fascinating.

[TeslabladePlaysMC]

2:33 The reason that square waves are not "horizontal" in those videos is because of a DC offset filter. It's effectively just a capacitor and resistor in real life, but what it is doing in software is just removing DC offset. that's why different duty cycles of waveforms shift up and down, as well. DC offset can strain speakers and amplifiers that have no DC offset filters, as well as cause then inevitable popping you hear when you turn a system on/off. We try our best to remove DC offset, since it's really not a good thing, so we have them on basically every audio device nowadays.

[corvusalbus]

Когда чуть не поперхнулся чаем, услышав "прекрасное далёко" в начале

[Nullx]

You realise that you are listening too much to chiptune music when you can tell the difference between the actual square and the sine way that sounds like the square

[blackskeleton]

there is something really creative you can do with this concept if you know sound design; while at normal pitch you cannot hear the difference between the waves, going down a lot of octaves *does* let you hear the phase rotation; ive been using this technique to create interesting growls and reeses (im a neuro/dubstep producer), because the usual clicky texture of the square/saw doesnt come through as much anymore

[TailRecursive]

This reminds me of doing a square wave in FM. My mind bugged out when I looked at a "square wave" oscilloscope that had a sine wave cut by a bunch of loud spikes.

[Alexander_Surchenko]

Неожиданное место, чтобы услышать "Прекрасное далеко"

[AminalCreacher]

How remarkable! Based on my understanding of how audio perception works, it makes perfect sense for phase to not matter, but I never really thought about it.

[VerMishelb]

Can't express how surprised I was when I heard the melody of the first few seconds. Humming that thing all the time for the last 10 years or so.

[dmey]

Hearing "Прекрасное далёко" in some random youtube video about square waves felt like derealization

[notassignedgetlost]

As a Russian, these first notes kinda made me shed a tear of nostalgia

[maxmikhailov]

If you'll lower the frequency of the ''randomized-phase square' to the "bass range" it actually starts to sound different (still "squarish" but more dirty). Another interesting expirience is to shift phases of only certain harmonics (for instance take a sawwave and shift only its evens by 90°). While the thing is barely noticeable at higher freqs, it's a whole new world of subtle (or not so subtle) variations for bass sounds. (Ah, I see a few people already mentioned this in comments above. Anyway.. :))

[meismofo]

interesting funfact about this: A normal square is basically perfect distortion, you cant really distort it more, at least not through Clipping, BUT if you mess up the phases first, you can distort a squarewave further.

[Linguae_Music]

The harmonic content of the wave is identical.
But the transient behavior is slightly different because of the phase warping.
Both waves are activating the exact same parts of the cochlea(harmonic content) But the kinetic interplay with the eardrum is different... just because of the phase-warp.
So the square wave has just a slighty punchier/pluckier transient.
But it would basically be totally unoticable unless you were playing low bass/sub register.

But honestly it might be too fast for the brain to even understand lmao

[lunogyt]

as a synth player and computer engineer this was one of the coolest things i've ever seen. The slanted square wave is super noticeable on the minilogue oscilloscope

[jessstuart]

Wow! I've never thought about rotating all the frequency components by a fixed amount to minimize the crest factor of a signal. I've never seen that in any signals and linear systems textbook.

[NyanCoder]

0:51 This song reminds me a lot of the refrain of "Прекрасное далеко" from the Soviet movie called "Guest from the future"

[Asterra]

In some ways this was an eye opener. For example I'm so used to just taking a triangle wave for granted that it never occurred to me that it could be compressed losslessly like that.