What ‘Slowed-with-Reverb’ Actually Means

And what it means for artists

You don’t have to go far on social media to hear the uncanny sounds of an altered track. Almost every soundtrack underneath a video online is some amalgamation or ‘edit’ of another piece of music. The most common of these edits is to either speed up or slow down a track, and, typically, to add a large amount of reverb.

At first I was slightly bemused by this trend. It was hardly new, remixes and reworking of songs and recordings have been going on since music began. The original artists themselves often change, edit, remix and even re-record their own songs. Art has always been an iterative process. The biggest change in recent decades, though, has been the rise of the audience as co-creators in a work. It started with other professional musicians and producers using high-grade, expensive equipment to separate tracks, isolate vocals and manipulate audio after a song has been released. But as this technology became more readily available to the layman we have started to see how the average listener feels about music. Or what they feel can be done to ‘improve’ on it.

The goal with digitally time stretching a track and adding reverb, it is said, is to turn the music into something mellower, becoming a type of audio wallpaper, that is more preferable to listen to as a relaxation…