Can You Trust Your Ears?

[_ronzlo_]

[nowaysj]

Certainly encountered many of these when producing. The fucking tritone effect still fucks me.

[_ronzlo_]

I just experienced it consciously for the first time this morning when I picked up my ukulele and played a two chords where one of the notes was higher than the other, yet the chord as a whole sounded lower.

WHAT.THE.FUCK.

[outbound]

Quite funny really how "flawed" our ears are.

I always wonder what it must be like for other species to hear our music, it must sound awful to them!

[rockonin]

In terms of music mixing,never trust your ears in a room that's not acoustically treated.

[nowaysj]

* by an acoustician.

--

And forgot to mention, no I can't trust my ears, they're bitches.

[Dub_Fiend]

What if your ears have trust issues?

[bouncingfish]

Can't trust them at all.

[DownUnderDub]

haha cool video
that riser thing got me

[m8son666]

You can trust them as everyone's ears are dishonest in the same way

[_ronzlo_]

Slutty, slutty ears.

[AxeD]

To clarify, every single individual hears completely different.

Thought somebody would jump on that from the beginning but I guess not.

[Banesy]

McGurk Effect! I love seeing those vids! Has anyone heard of Get High Now?

http://gethighnow.com/audio-highs/

Check out the holophonic sound. That is by far my favorite.

[outbound]

McGurk Effect! I love seeing those vids! Has anyone heard of Get High Now?

http://gethighnow.com/audio-highs/

Check out the holophonic sound. That is by far my favorite.

Mmmmm shepard tones

[_ronzlo_]

[_ronzlo_]

A Sound You Can't Unhear (And What It Says About Your Brain)
Feel your brain at work as it transforms gibberish into an intelligible sentence

Soundcloud

Just listen to this radio clip. It's only takes 50 seconds for the Franklin Institute's chief bioscientist, Jayatri Das, to demonstrate something fundamental about your brain.

She starts with a clip that's been digitally altered to sound like jibberish. On first listen, to my ears, it was entirely meaningless. Next, Das plays the original, unaltered clip: a woman's voice saying, "The Constitution Center is at the next stop." Then we hear the jibberish clip again, and woven inside what had sounded like nonsense, we hear "The Constitution Center is at the next stop."

The point is: When our brains know what to expect to hear, they do, even if, in reality, it is impossible. Not one person could decipher that clip without knowing what they were hearing, but with the prompt, it's impossible not to hear the message in the jibberish.

This is a wonderful audio illusion.

The reason is that we still think of our senses—sight, hearing, touch—as reflecting the outside world, purely. But they don't. They provide us with a mixture of the world out there and our own expectations.

We explored this in the visual realm a few weeks ago, playing with images that you "can't unsee," which flip your perception of a phenomenon. The first example that I came across was that the World Cup logo looks like someone executing the maneuver known as the facepalm.



Now that you've been tuned to look for this meaning in the World Cup logo, it will be difficult not to see this alternate meaning for what is supposed to be a soccer ball trophy thing.

Surveying the latest evidence about how our brains work, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, Andy Clark summed it up: "All this makes the line between perception and cognition fuzzy, perhaps even vanishing."

Hearing, itself, is thinking. Which makes it subject to the machinations of the rest of the brain, which are constantly priming the ears about what they should be expecting.

Back to the clip at the top, come back to this story in a day or two, and I bet you'll find that even on the first listen to the jibberish sound, you'll perceive some meaning. You'll pick up a hint of one of the words in the sentence, and you'll detect the rhythm of the sentence.

There is meaning in the noise precisely to the degree that I can remember what to expect it to be.

That's the power of cognitive expectation, and it's working at a level beyond (or maybe the word is underneath) your conscious control.

[m8son666]

To clarify, every single individual hears completely different.

really? i mean i doubt everyone hears exactly the same but do we really hear completely different to each other?

[_ronzlo_]

To clarify, every single individual hears completely different.

really? i mean i doubt everyone hears exactly the same but do we really hear completely different to each other?

How else do you account for the fact that some people turn on Nickelback or Creed and go "Mmmm! Yeah! That's good shit right there!" while the rest of us are like "wait... what the fuck is this shit?"

[m8son666]

haha good point but i thought that would be more to do with what happens in the brain once the sound has been heard to comprehend it

although i suppose that would be included in hearing

[_ronzlo_]

haha good point but i thought that would be more to do with what happens in the brain once the sound has been heard to comprehend it

although i suppose that would be included in hearing

Yep. Like the old "if a tree falls in a forest" bit: it actually doesn't make a sound because sound is received modulated air in ears; you can have the modulated air, but it doesn't become sound until someone's eardrums are there to pick it up.