The Uncanny Sound Illusion That Creates Suspense in Christopher Nolan's Movies. The Mummy (Tom Cruise) (2017) Movie Out. Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit.

But the director does have a knack for creating an unnerving degree of tension. Turns out he’s using a little bit of musical magic to do it.

The magic is actually a science- based audio illusion called a Shepard tone. Named after psychologist Roger Shepard, a pioneer in our understanding of spatial relation, the effect sounds like an infinitely ascending or descending scale. The tones are constantly moving upwards or downwards, but they never seem to reach a pinnacle or nadir. This is accomplished by stacking scales on top of each other—typically one treble scale, one midrange, and one bass—with an octave in between, then playing them in a continuous loop. A Shepard tone is sometimes referred to as the barber pole of sound. You can even see the similarity, when you hear it and look at the spectrum view of a Shepard tone. Don’t listen to this too long, or you might lose your mind: Anyways, Christopher Nolan just loves this.

With longtime collaborator Hans Zimmer, the acclaimed director has used a Shepard tone in almost every one of his films in the last decade. He even writes his scripts to match the effect. In a recent interview, Nolan explained how he used Shepard tones in his newest film, Dunkirk: The screenplay had been written according to musical principals.

• Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit.
• LeEco’s dream of breaking into the US market and competing against Apple is now farther from reality than ever before. The Chinese tech firm’s American operation.

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Apple, a company you may be aware of from their Pippin game console, until fairly recently had some very ambitious autonomous car plans. Ambitious in the sense that.

There’s an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a “Shepard tone” and with my composer David Julyan on “The Prestige” we explored that and based a lot of the score around that. And it’s an illusion where there’s a continuing ascension of tone. It’s a corkscrew effect. It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle. I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there’s a continual feeling of intensity.

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Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Knowing this, you gain a deeper understanding of films like Interstellar, Inception, and The Prestige. It also explains why these films seem somehow inconclusive.

A Shepard’s tone creates a conflict that can’t be resolved, just like Nolan’s plots.

Things Just Keep Getting Worse For China's Fallen Tech Upstart Le. Eco. Le. Eco’s dream of breaking into the US market and competing against Apple is now farther from reality than ever before. The Chinese tech firm’s American operation has had a difficult year with missed payrolls, disappearing employees, and overall poor sales.

But the latest development in Le. Eco’s financial woes is sure to make things go from bad to worse. In 2. 01. 6, rising Chinese tech star Le. Eco made an aggressive move to conquer the unfamiliar US market . The ruling also affected assets linked to Yueting’s wife and three other Le.

Eco affiliates. The Shanghai High People’s Court made the ruling last week, which clamped down on the assets linked to loan for the Le. Eco’s private smartphone brach, Le Mobile. Le. Eco began mounting debt in 2. US expansion by raising more than $6 billion.

The heavy borrowing has taken a toll. Yueting admitted to shareholders last week that the company had made some mistakes with allocating funds.“The cash problems at the non- publicly traded businesses are more serious than when this crisis erupted,” Mr. Jia told investors, according to a transcript. According to the Times, the company has resources to cover the debt and will work with China Merchants Bank to repay it.