I grew up in a hilly area with a lot of broadcast towers quite close, and driving around I often encountered a lovely distortion on FM radio as the landscape mucked up the radio waves. It was a beating in the reception volume, with the sound itself taking on a very particular lo-fi character.
I've always been thinking what a cool effect that would make, as in my perception it has a strange, spacey, hard sci-fi loneliness to it, but unfortunately I haven't even been able to find an instance of it recorded on youtube, let alone a VST plugin that emulates it. I'm not even certain about the exact physics involved, but I think it might have to do with interference from waves reflected off the landscape, creating a beating effect...
The discussions and plugins I've seen that address "radio distortion" usually just boil down to recordings of radio static. I'm not talking about static. I'm talking about a specific distortion to the signal itself. I think people who drive around in hilly urban areas will know what I'm talking about. Is there anything out there that allows you to replicate this effect?
