Shepard Tone Generator with Speed and Direction Controls
Press Play for a tone that seems to climb for ever, then set its speed and direction or save a looping WAV.
Shepard Tone Generator with Speed and Direction Controls: rising Shepard tone
Start with your device volume low.
Shepard tone · both channels
Always rising
One octave every 10 seconds
9 sine waves an octave apart
Ready. It starts quiet and fades in over half a second.
A steady tone can harm ears and speakers before it sounds loud. Hear nothing? Do not turn it up to find the tone: small speakers cannot play very low tones, and many adults cannot hear very high ones.
Percent of this tool's loudest. Your device volume does the rest.
This Shepard tone generator slides nine sine waves, each an octave apart, upwards. Each fades in at the bottom and out at the top, so the pitch seems to rise for ever. Pick Rising or Falling, set one octave to take 2 to 30 seconds, and save a WAV that loops without a click.
Read the full guide
Set direction and speed
Press Play and the tone fades in at 10 percent volume. Rising and Falling swap the direction. The slider labelled One octave every sets the speed. Press the preset One semitone a second for 12 seconds an octave. After one octave the sound is back exactly where it began, yet the ear does not pick out a step down.
Save a loop with no seam
Save WAV renders whole octaves only, so the end of the file runs into its start with no seam. Expect about 30 seconds: 36 at 12 seconds an octave. For music, pick a speed equal to whole bars: bars × beats × 60 ÷ BPM makes the Four-bar riser at 120 BPM 8 seconds. Loop the file in an audio editor or sampler and it sits on the bar line. Some players pause between repeats. That pause is the player, not the file.
A phone or laptop speaker is enough: the loudness curve peaks near 622 Hz, and waves under 100 Hz sit below 37 percent of full level.
Do not follow the highest whistle alone: you will hear it fade near the top, which is the trick showing its hand.
The file carries the volume slider's level, so one saved at 10 percent is quiet on purpose. Set the loudness on the player.
Questions and answers
How does a Shepard tone work?
Sine waves exactly an octave apart all glide the same way. A bell-shaped loudness curve keeps the middle ones loud and the outer ones silent. One fades out at the top while another fades in at the bottom, unnoticed. Roger Shepard described it in 1964. People liken it to a barber's pole, whose stripes climb and go nowhere.
Is this a Shepard scale or a Shepard-Risset glissando?
A glissando. Shepard's original was a scale of separate steps. The French composer Jean-Claude Risset later made the version that glides without steps, which this page plays. It cannot play the stepped scale, or the pair of tones half an octave apart that Diana Deutsch used in 1986 to show that listeners disagree about which is higher.
Can a Shepard tone make you anxious or dizzy?
Sound designers use the endless climb to build tension, and some listeners find it tiring after a while. It is an auditory illusion, not a treatment or a hearing test. If it bothers you, press Stop.
All 24 presets
Rising 15
A major third a secondThree seconds an octave is four semitones a second, so every octave passes as three stacked major thirds. It is also one 4/4 bar at 80 BPM. Ten loops fill the 30-second file.
A whole tone a secondSix seconds an octave is 200 cents a second: the six steps of a whole-tone scale, one a second, and the octave is done. Also four bars of 3/4 at 120 BPM, or four bars of 4/4 at 160 BPM. Five loops fill the file.
Classic rise, one octave every 10 secondsThe page's own sound. Each sine wave climbs 1.2 semitones a second and needs 90 seconds to cross all nine octaves, yet the whole pattern repeats every 10 seconds. Save WAV gives three octaves, 30 seconds.
Eight-bar riser at 96 BPMA bar of 4/4 at 96 BPM lasts 2.5 seconds, so eight bars are 20 seconds. The tool rounds the file to whole octaves, which here means two loops and 40 seconds, the longest file this page makes.
Show all 24 presets (20 more)
Rising, continued
Eight-bar riser at 120 BPMSixteen seconds is eight bars at 120 BPM or six bars at 90 BPM, at 75 cents a second. Save WAV gives two loops, 32 seconds. Both halves are the same samples, so you can cut the file in the middle and keep either part.
Eight-bar riser at 128 BPMA 4/4 bar at 128 BPM lasts 1.875 seconds, so eight bars come to exactly 15 seconds. Two loops fill the 30-second file. Trim it to one loop in an editor and it sits on the bar line for as long as you repeat it.
Fastest climb, 2 seconds an octaveSix semitones a second, the quickest the tool allows, and exactly one 4/4 bar at 120 BPM. Each wave crosses the whole range in 18 seconds, and fifteen loops fit in the 30-second file.
Four-bar riser at 120 BPMEight seconds: four bars of 4/4 at 120 BPM, two bars at 60 BPM or three bars at 90 BPM. The glide is a semitone and a half each second. Save WAV gives four loops, 32 seconds.
Half a semitone a secondFifty cents a second, a quarter tone. In one minute every sine wave has climbed two and a half octaves, and the sound is no higher than when you pressed Play. Save WAV gives a single 24-second octave: eight bars of 4/4 at 80 BPM.
Left channel only, risingThe rise in the left channel and silence in the right. A panned sound is saved as a two-channel file, so this WAV is 5.8 MB where the other 30-second files are 2.9 MB.
One semitone a secondTwelve seconds an octave is exactly 100 cents a second: one piano key higher with every tick of a clock. The file only ever holds whole octaves, so Save WAV gives 36 seconds here, not 30.
Quiet start for headphonesOpens at 5 percent, half the page's usual start and about 6 dB lower. Headphones sit right against your ears, and most of this sound is in the mid range, not the bass, so begin here and raise it slowly.
Right channel only, risingThe mirror of the left-channel rise. Play one, then the other: if the sound comes from the wrong side, the headphones are on backwards or the speaker leads are swapped.
Slowest climb, 30 seconds an octaveThe slowest setting: 40 cents a second, or sixteen bars of 4/4 at 128 BPM. One sine wave takes four and a half minutes to travel from 27.5 Hz to 14,080 Hz. For a long listen: look at the clock after five minutes and ask how far it seems to have risen.
Two-bar riser at 120 BPMFour seconds is two 4/4 bars at 120 BPM. For any other tempo the sum is bars × beats in a bar × 60 ÷ BPM, and the answer has to be a whole number of seconds from 2 to 30. Save WAV gives eight loops, 32 seconds.
Falling 9
A minor third a second, fallingFour seconds an octave is three semitones a second, so each octave passes as four minor thirds, the notes of a diminished seventh chord. Two bars of 4/4 at 120 BPM. The file is eight loops, 32 seconds.
Classic fall, one octave every 10 secondsThe rising sound played backwards, sample for sample, which is how this tool makes every falling tone. New sine waves now enter silently at the top, near 14,080 Hz, and leave at the bottom. Ten seconds is four bars of 4/4 at 96 BPM.
Falling a semitone a secondOne piano key lower every second. Twelve seconds is also four bars at 80 BPM, five bars at 100 BPM and eight bars of 3/4 at 120 BPM, so one file serves several tempos. It is 36 seconds long, three whole octaves.
Fastest fall, 2 seconds an octaveA tritone a second downwards, like a machine winding down that never reaches a stop. The file holds fifteen identical loops: trim one 2-second loop from it and it repeats on every 4/4 bar at 120 BPM.
Four-bar drop at 120 BPMEight seconds down. This file and the four-bar riser are both 32 seconds long and both repeat every 8 seconds, so a rise and a fall laid on two tracks of an audio editor stay in step for as long as they loop.
Right channel only, fallingThe fall in the right channel alone. Save this and the left-channel rise, put them on two tracks in any audio editor, and on headphones one ear climbs while the other sinks, both repeating every 10 seconds.
Slow sink, 20 seconds an octaveSixty cents a second, and eight bars of 4/4 at 96 BPM. Whatever the speed, the loudest sine wave is the one nearest 622 Hz, D sharp 5, the centre of the bell-shaped loudness curve. A wave sliding down past 110 Hz has already dropped to 41 percent of full level.
Slowest descent, 30 seconds an octaveForty cents a second downwards, and sixteen bars at 128 BPM if it has to fit a track. One octave fills the whole 30-second file, so the file is a single loop with no repeat inside it.
Two-bar drop at 96 BPMTwo bars of 4/4 at 96 BPM come to 5 seconds. The fall is 240 cents a second, a little more than a whole tone. Six loops fill the file exactly, so it is 30 seconds long.
How this list was compiled: Presets written for this page. Each one is a direction, a speed in whole seconds for one octave and, for four of them, a channel or a lower start volume, which are the only settings the generator has. How the sound is built (nine sine waves an octave apart from 27.5 Hz, a raised-cosine loudness curve over the nine octaves, a falling tone made by reversing the rising one, files that hold whole octaves, 16-bit mono WAV at 48,000 samples a second, two channels when a sound is panned) was read from this site's own tone generator code on 2026-09-19. The account of the illusion in the page copy was checked on 2026-09-19 against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone (sine waves separated by octaves; named after Roger Shepard, whose paper "Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch" appeared in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in December 1964; the stepped Shepard scale and the continuous Shepard-Risset glissando; the barber's pole comparison; Risset's endless tempo effect), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Risset (French composer, 1938 to 2016, at Bell Labs from 1964) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone_paradox (Diana Deutsch, 1986; listeners disagree about which of two Shepard tones half an octave apart is higher). Computed, not looked up: semitones and cents a second (12 and 1,200 divided by the seconds for an octave); the time one sine wave needs to cross the range (nine times the seconds for an octave); the top of the range, 27.5 x 2^9 = 14,080 Hz; the centre of the loudness curve, 27.5 x 2^4.5 = 622.25 Hz, which is D sharp 5 in equal temperament with A4 = 440 Hz; the curve's level at 110 Hz, 41 percent; bar lengths from bars x beats in a bar x 60 / BPM (a row is in the group Loops that fit a tempo when, and only when, it names a bar count and a BPM); file lengths from the generator's rule of rounding 30 seconds to whole octaves; file sizes from 48,000 samples a second at two bytes a sample; and 20 x log10(0.5), about 6 dB, for the 5 percent preset. Licence: own work