The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@kiki There you have it. ^^

I looked at the spiky one and thought. “They are going to tell me that it is Kiki.”

I read the article and now I have all of this egg on my face.

This research sounds like fun - recognizing more ways for everyone to communicate something exact without having to reiterate.

I literally referenced this in my previous rants, with that same picture from Wikipedia

@kiki Oh, I didn't see that. I somehow thought you explained bouba as Russian for sucker or so.

@Fast-Nop nah, it's his invented meaning for "bouba"

@iiii I really like @kiki 's invented meaning. Always makes me chuckle.

@anux is officially the man of culture

@kiki oh wow!
*hides away like a bouba*

@anux I mean you're the first and the only one who got the joke, years after. That two words are literally designed to have no meaning, and I thought it would be funny to make some. I purposely chose the most basic and general dichotomy, "good" and "bad".

Congratulations!

it's not a mapping between SPEECH sounds.

i never tested it, but i am about 99% sure it would also work with just soundwaves.

pure sine for bouba shape, square or saw for kiki shape.

i am pretty sure that is actually the original underlying mapping, of which the words "bouba" and "kiki" are just second-order manifestations.

@Midnight-shcode bouba sine gives me headache. Kiki square wave is the sound of fuzz in its purest form, the most important guitar effect in the history of music.

@kiki yeah, certain frequencies of pure sine give me headaches too, happens to many people i think, it's somewhere in the lower mid range (i don't remember the Hz value, only how the tone sounds :( )

@kiki
... wait, isn't saw wave the guitar base effect one? sounds much closer, square sounds too digital, it has the harshness, but not the dirt, while saw does have the rock guitar dirt...?

@Midnight-shcode in guitar sound, when we speak about waveforms, the overdrive, distortion and fuzz are the same. They just crop the “tops” off of otherwise sine wave that is “clean sound”. The lower it crops, the more sound is close to the square wave.

All the other differences based on how consistent the effects pedal (or a tube amp) across different strings that has less power in watts (thinner strings produces less power in guitar pickups). For example, some hard clipping fuzz pedals, especially from the sixties, only produce distortion on top three thicker strings, and remaining three strings produce super fucking awful, broken sound of ice pick in your ear.

@Midnight-shcode first fuzz pedals were based on Schmitt trigger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), straight up gated square wave that only works when guitar output current is high enough, e.g. top 3 thick strings.

Modern overdrive and distortion schematics include compression, so they always work and produce predictable sound that is a pleasure to play through. The contenders to be such a compressed overdrive are EHX Big Muff, that one Gilmour used, and Ibanez Tube Screamer, used by everyone, made famous by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

@Midnight-shcode in vintage fuzz pedals, that Schmitt trigger is basically what schematics are. There are no transistor cascades in place to do any compression or amplification. In Big Muff, there are four transistor cascades put in series. The first two do compression, third does clipping, and fourth acts as a buffer. Matter of fact, Big Muff aimed to be a sustainer pedal, not a fuzz one. Fuzz came as a side effect, but it sounded so good that Big Muff was actually only used by musicians as a fuzz pedal.

In Tube Screamer, there are two cascades that act as a guitar amp, but on lower scale. The first cascade is a preamp, the second is a power amp. There are diodes that do all the clipping. If you remove them, you get just a booster pedal without any clipping and not an overdrive one.