A endless staircase and a music that seems to follow the same destiny. Step after step, the ladder always continues upwards with no end on the horizon. In the same way, the music accompanies the walk, inviting us to believe that the next tone will be higher than the previous one.
A auditory illusion that some will know thanks to the devotion that director Christopher Nolan professes in his films, but that is already a classic in the history of video games thanks to Super Mario 64 and the stairs of its last section.
A tribute to shepard tone that we can also find in movies like The dark knight (Batman’s bike uses this technique to simulate constant acceleration), Dunkirk or, of course, also musical themes such as Always Ascending by Franz Ferdinand.
The idea behind the Shepard tone, named after its creator, Roger Shepard, is to create a musical scale with electronically generated tones that simulates this constant rise, giving the feeling that the music is always going up, or down, in time. an endless loop.
Although the loop in the topic of Super Mario 64 is not perfect, the addition of the auditory illusion to the ever-expanding stairs strengthen the idea that we are in an endless loop. In fact, some have taken the opportunity to create videos like the one below, with 10 hours of stairs and the shepard tone designed for the occasion.