Fun auditory illusions
This week's New Scientist is a special issue about music, featuring an article titled "The Music Illusion" by Daniel Levitin, author of the popular book This Is Your Brain On Music. Sadly, the article is behind the magazine's paywall. But the magazine has posted links to five interesting auditory illusions that are quite a trip.Link (via Further: Strange Attractor & beyond)
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The scale example isn't quite accurate, because her tone generator doesn't reattack the second pair of the sequence. Try it on piano, and the effect, though still slightly there, is substantially less pronounced.
The reason for the effect is the gestalt grouping effect that happens with the apparent repetition. However, this is only true when both instruments have a highly, highly similar timbre. Play one scale on piano, and one on violin, or even just use two singers, and you will hear two scales. This is less of a musical illusion and more of a timbral illusion. To reduce the boundary effect produced by the repeated F-G dyad, start one scale on B and the other on C, and play them as 9 note scales.
The barbershop is nice. But if you haven't heard holophonic sound, it is truly worth checking out. Listen with a pair of headphones and you will hear the sound move not only left and right, but up and down. Pretty amazing.
http://guymal.com/blog/2006/01/holophonic-3d-sound.php
Eric Monse
I produce a show called Solipsistic Nation (http://solipsisticnation.com) where I play the best of all genres of electronic music and by coincidence and to my delight, today's show features a segment on Diana Deutsch. The Phantom words illusion was first demonstrated by Diana and you can hear excerpts of two of her illusions on this week's show, which you can find at http://tinyurl.com/ysrajz or download directly from http://tinyurl.com/2a4l6s
I daren't reveal what I heard in the "Phantom Words" illusion. :D
This strongly reminds me of EAX in gaming.
If people can hear what's on their mind (phantom words), does this include the subconscious mind and can people use this information in psychoanalysis?
The barbershop one made me profoundly uncomortable. When the scissors were snipping, I thought I could feel my hair being cut.
The Radio Lab podcast had another interesting audio illusion a while back. Follow this link, then scroll down to the one called "Musical Language":
http://feeds.wnyc.org/radiolab
Listen to the first five minutes or so.
I just wanted to add that Daniel Levitin's book linked in the post is a really great read. I received it as a gift this past December and it was one of the best books I've had a chance to read in a long time.
I highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in music, musicianship or psychology. It covers enough basic music theory and neuro-physiology so that you can really appreciate the concepts that he brings up later in the book, but it also covers some pretty advanced behavioral stuff. The last chapter, which was the most interesting for me, was a theory of the evolutionary origins of music. Really insightful, well written book. Thanks for bringing it to the attention of bb readers, Dave.
My favourite illusion (not included in this article) is the Shepard Scale; a tone that appears to rise (or fall) in pitch forever.
The example on the Wikipedia page isn't great- Ms Deutsch demonstrated a much better one on a Radio 3 programme a while ago.
As you can kind of tell by reading between the lines of the articles about music in that New Scientist issue, music scientists don't really have a clue as to what this thing called "music" (which they are studying) actually is, let alone what it might be for, if indeed it is for anything.
My own "super-stimulus" theory is based on the assumption that music is a super-stimulus for an otherwise hidden component of speech perception. The most recent development of my theory, as explained in Music: A Drug, Which Used To Be Stronger Than It Is Now, Musical Immunity and Auditory Super-Cheesecake and Music: The Hidden Sense and the Three Ways of Knowing, is that this hidden component is responsible for our ability to slowly but steadily acquire a useful "worldview" directly from what other people tell us.
In the past, our response to music, as a type of "false speech", was so strong that it compromised our perception of reality, and this may even have led to our near extinction as a species. We have since evolved partial resistance to the effects of music, which explains our somewhat ambiguous emotional response to music, i.e. music makes us "feel" emotions, but we know that they are not real, especially once the music has stopped.
With the "phantom melodies" illusion I still hear the phantom melody even at slow speed. What in the world does that mean!?