Music has interesting temporal perception properties.  Our sense of time and the speed at which we feel time is moving can vary depending on what we are listening to.  Manipulation of tempo and pitch can be ways of controlling those perceptions on the listener.

An interesting production tequnique is to record something at a certain sample rate (the speed at which audio is captured digitally) and then to play back at a faster rate thus speeding up the tempo of the music as well as raising the pitch.   Building on that, sometimes it can be cool to lower the pitch during the recording so that when the faster sample rate is implemented the sound is at the pitch originally intended. For example: Lowering a sound by one octave and recording it at a certain sample rate and then playing that recording back at twice that rate will get the sound back to the original octave.

So why do it? Well, eventhought the pitch is the same all of the performance nuances also get sped up also and thus create a feeling of sped up hyper-twichiness which can be perfect for certain types of  footage and editing styles. It also affects timbre is a way that makes the music and instruments have a “wound up tight” quality that can comical.

Check out this Simpsons promo by PR!MO. The video can be found at (www.shooteditsleep.com) that uses time lapse and editing to speed up the graffiti job. The track, which implements the techniques mentioned above, fits perfectly:

Check out this Simpsons promo by PR!MO (www.shooteditsleep.com) that uses time lapse and editing to speed up the graffiti job. The track, which implements the techniques mentioned above, fits perfectly:

Another example is this Cartoon Network Robot Chicken spot: