Audio Illusions

axj

axj

The Living Force
Most people are probably familiar with optical illusions where our brain is tricked into misperceiving something, but I didn't know that similar audio illusions exist as well. Here is one example:


You need to play it twice and focus on the other word the second time.

It's kind of spooky, but also insightful regarding our auditory perception.
 
I just learned that this is called the McGurk effect:

Normally, speech perception is thought to be an auditory process; however, our use of information is immediate, automatic, and, to a large degree, unconscious and therefore, despite what is widely accepted as true, speech is not only something we hear. Speech is perceived by all of the senses working together (seeing, touching, and listening to a face move).

Vision is the primary sense for humans, but speech perception is multimodal, which means that it involves information from more than one sensory modality, in particular, audition and vision.

The McGurk effect is very robust; that is, knowledge about it seems to have little effect on one's perception of it. This is different from certain optical illusions, which break down once one 'sees through' them.

The brain is often unaware of the separate sensory contributions of what it perceives. Therefore, when it comes to recognizing speech the brain cannot differentiate whether it is seeing or hearing the incoming information.
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McGurk effect - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
I listened to this 6 or 7 times after the prescribed two listens. I said out loud “WT Actual F”? Blew my mind. I don’t understand how storm and needle can be perceived from the same sounds. I tried with eyes closed and clear mind and brainstorm came through...then I was thinking green needle and I heard that. Spooky stuff.
 
axj said:
Most people are probably familiar with optical illusions where our brain is tricked into misperceiving something, but I didn't know that similar audio illusions exist as well. Here is one example:


You need to play it twice and focus on the other word the second time.

It's kind of spooky, but also insightful regarding our auditory perception.
Click to expand...

I listened to it almost 100 times, a spwishler sound, then followed by "brain storm" then they run the spwishler sound again slightly altered and cut off. I simply can't identify how Green Needle is gleaned from this rubbish, it's only mentioned in the video visually and in it's title. I cant hear Green Needle at all! I'm tempted to run it through a spectrum analyzer to prove it but this 7 second video extracted far too much time from me as it is!
 
Like the Yanny/Laurel one, part of the reason is probably that different ranges of the frequencies of the recording sound more like one or the other. See this video with isolated portions of the audio spectrum.


My guess is that it has to do with at least two other things as well. First, the muscles in our ears are very good at filtering out certain frequencies of sound, in order to isolate human voices. (Porges argues that this contributes to why kids with autism can't hear speech very well.) And then there is the function of consciousness as meaning-making, order-from-chaos. The mind will try to make sense and find meaning in ambiguous data. So when confronted with audio that CAN be heard in two ways, because each is encoded in a different range of frequencies, priming can determine which one you end up hearing. It would be interesting to know if there is an actual difference in the muscles of the ears, and if they shift depending on the priming, or if the result is strictly mental/brain-based, and the signal sent by the ears is the same in either case.
 
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Approaching Infinity said:
Like the Yanny/Laurel one, part of the reason is probably that different ranges of the frequencies of the recording sound more like one or the other. See this video with isolated portions of the audio spectrum.


My guess is that it has to do with at least two other things as well. First, the muscles in our ears are very good at filtering out certain frequencies of sound, in order to isolate human voices. (Porges argues that this contributes to why kids with autism can't hear speech very well.) And then there is the function of consciousness a meaning-making, order-from-chaos. The mind will try to make sense and find meaning in ambiguous data. So when confronted with audio that CAN be heard in two ways, because each is encoded in a different range of frequencies, priming can determine which one you end up hearing. It would be interesting to know if there is an actual difference in the muscles of the ears, and if they shift depending on the priming, or if the result is strictly mental/brain-based, and the signal sent by the ears is the same in either case.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm not surprised this spectrum analysis this was done. The 48 second mark of your video was the first time I heard green needle from this audio sample. So its basically two audio samples layered onto each other, the brain picks up one or the other until primed (which your video helped with). Now I hear both at the same time when I listen to the original, though I think brain storm is louder, green needle is more of an ambience when both played at the same time, almost like two conversations at the same time in a public setting.

Cheers
 
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