I was about to question everything until I read this. Thanks AE. My understanding of MBC is more like a crossover (or mix of low, bandpass, and highpass filters) network followed by compression per band within each section of the frequency range.
Now, I want to go test out what it would be like to 'compress' frequencies. Something like a notch filter that shifts nearby frequencies around the target frequency away into regions above and below. It adds noise, essentially, within the compressed range, but maybe it's tolerable and is useful for someone with a narrow band hearing loss. It could potentially be interesting musically.
Maybe such a filter exists, but I am not familiar with it.
If you're interested in frequency shifting, Harald Bode was the leading engineer in this area. You can read a gentle introduction here: and if you look around there are some VST plugins that emulate the Bode designs.
I haven't tried using this for precision stuff - over a small range it might well improve intelligibility at the expense of only minor distortion. I tend to reach for it when I want to give sounds an extra weird dimension, it sounds somewhat orthogonal to the normal harmonic distributions we're familiar with.
>I was about to question everything until I read this. Thanks AE. My understanding of MBC is more like a crossover (or mix of low, bandpass, and highpass filters) network followed by compression per band within each section of the frequency range.
This is exactly right. Basically, you separate the audio into arbitrary frequency bands, and then apply compression to each band to control its volume independent of what is going on in the rest of the spectrum.
I was incredibly frustrated by reading the article, since their explanation of multiband compression was incredibly misleading. I get what they're doing and why multiband is helpful (it sounds like they're basically bringing up the volume in the parts of the spectrum where the user's hearing is less sensitive than healthy hearing would be), but that was a poor explanation of how multiband compression works.
Well, that's probably why. Somewhat obvious. If you put something through with content in and around the range, you get a notch filter with a resonant hump... not all that interesting.
Now, I want to go test out what it would be like to 'compress' frequencies. Something like a notch filter that shifts nearby frequencies around the target frequency away into regions above and below. It adds noise, essentially, within the compressed range, but maybe it's tolerable and is useful for someone with a narrow band hearing loss. It could potentially be interesting musically.
Maybe such a filter exists, but I am not familiar with it.