I would like you to do me a favor. Listen to the recording in the following link: http://philomel.com/phantom_words/wav/Track_22.wav Then, listen to the very beginning of it again. Just the initial sentence. Post your results here. I'll explain later.
The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. sometimes behave so strangely sometimes behave so strangely sometimes behave so strangely sometimes behave so strangely sometimes behave so strangely sometimes behave so strangely so strangely so strangely so strangely hmm?
Throughout the repeating part, it began to sound more and more like sounds with no meaning... like it wasn't language at all. I attribute this to neural fatigue. But, I am not sure where you are going with this.
Hmm. No one got it. I wondered how much had to do with suggestion. You'll hear it once I tell you. Not yet though. It's pretty cool. One question. The initial sentence. Just an ordinary sentence, yes? Ordinary spoken english?
The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. It does sound a bit odd - not sure whether it is because of the digital rendition of the sound, or the woman speaker had something in her mouth or some speech impairment. So, what's the deal?
I dunno how much it had to do with suggestion, because the "instructions" didn't prompt me to discern what one was "supposed to" be able to. Perhaps my brain is just defective. :crazy:
I'm a musician so I suppose I hear things differently. The words kept sounding like words, the meaning of the repeated phrase continued to be clear. The repetitions were very nearly identical, I can't tell if the lady is actually repeating the words or if it's a sample repeated electronically. Her pitch and volume rises and falls consistently from one repetition to the next. It actually has a fairly good musical cadence. I'm not interested enough to put in the time and effort, but I suspect you could set that to music without having to cut and splice. I think it maintains a consistent tempo and beat. It's good use of the words, shortening a sentence to a clause to a phrase, continually highlighting the words "so strangely," which become self-descriptive. A longer piece built that way might work as avant-garde poetry, although it would have worked better 35 or 40 years ago. Today it would make good hip-hop.
I heard the musical quality right away also. I think that in the original recording the speaker deliberately "sung" the words 'sometimes behave so strangely' to a prerehearsed melody line. Then they just looped that part. My guess anyway.
Alright. That's enough participation, I think. Enough people heard the music to cause the suggestion in later listeners so it shouldn't matter if I give the explanation now. The audio is from Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at San Diego University of California. She studies how we perceive sound. She had a number of sounds on a tape and one of these was the sentence in the original link. I'm not entirely clear on what her original intent was with the sentence, but this is the story she gives on how it turned into what it has become. She had the tape on the loop you heard, "sometimes behave so strangely... sometimes behave so strangely..." when she got up to go fix some tea or something like that. The loop continued to play in the background but she wasn't really paying much attention to it. Then, she stopped and thought, "Is that music playing?" She then realized it was her own voice and remembered that she had the loop playing over and over again. Supposedly she did not purposefully speak the sentence in a musical manner, that is just the natural lilt of her voice. And, I can say without hesitation that when I first heard the sentence I thought nothing of it. Just a sentence in an accent. No big deal. In fact, during the repetitions I didn't really perceive much of a change either (although I was only paying half attention to it as it was on the radio (NPR) and I was driving). It wasn't until after the musical quality was mentioned and they even played the notes on a piano: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Only then did I suddenly hear the music. And this is the part that interests me most. Then. After hearing the music. While listening to the sentence, I hear the ordinary spoken sentence until that part and then it bursts into song for those few words. That shift in perception is quite strong to me. http://philomel.com/phantom_words/sometimes.php By the way, I also linked this with the phenomena of word repetition making words into gibberish. A different aspect of the same basic trait, I should think. I don't know about you, but I find this damned interesting. I meant I wondered how much of my perception of it had to do with the suggestion of it being there. I tend to have a hard time discerning lyrics. But, as soon as I read a lyric sheet, wham, I can hear it perfectly. Same thing for spoken spanish. I have difficulty parsing words, but if I read captions of spoken spanish I can parse them far more readily. The same thing occurs while listening to back masking. It sounds like gibberish until the 'translation' of what it's supposed to be is displayed then I can hear it. (Here's a site where various backmasked songs are playable: http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking.htm ) There is a show called Ghost Hunters on Sci Fi where they attempt to capture spirit voices on digital recorders where the same phenomena takes place. So, I wondered how other people would react to the sounds without any coaching on what was 'supposed' to happen. Seemed pretty split.
And now: it's headfuck time. http://philomel.com/phantom_words/wav/Track_06.wav 10MB download so could take a little while. Jot down any new words you hear (me: none, but I have downloaded it and saved it as an MP3 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!).
I play piano, and until I read the sheet music, I can't play it. I can't just hear a music and then play it, without the help of sheet music. I think it has something to do with connecting symbols with meanings.... A prodigy knows the music already, so s/he doesn't need to read the symbols in order to know what to play. Prodigies also don't make mistakes, because they know which notes to play. I, in the other hand, often struggle trying to remember notes. Specially when I have to play fast. F***... it's so scary playing for an audience when all that you see when you look down at your hands is a huge blur! LOL!!!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
He he. Years back, there was Beck's song "Loser". A portion of the lyrics was sometimes rendered in writing as "So yo un perdido" (meaning "I'm a loser") and other times as "So you impair the door". Since it's a whacky song, both could make sense. If the person who was transcribing the lyrics didn't speak Spanish, they'd just go for the English "So you impair the door". Even though that was not what Beck was actually singing. Otherwise, parsing words is secondary and we only become really aware of it in reading and writing. The difficulties you describe are common, at least to some extent.
Parsing, both speach (into discrete words) and the 2D CONTINUOUS visual field present on your retinas (into discrete objects) is an amazingly complex CREATIVE* process well beyond current IT's abilites in the vision case in any normal view (only in "toy worlds" of a few previously learned geometric objects) I made some original contribution to how the 2D retinal image is parsed, but it is too complex to describe here. They are published in the first reference of my essay on Genuine Free Will (The posibility of GFW "fell out" accidently from the new model of vision I developed while granted a year sebatical.) See: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1294496&postcount=52 If you have access to microphone and oscilloscope, it is interesting to note that in normal speech there are no spaces between the words you speak. With more sophisticated equipment you can clearly see that the first part of the next word is being produced before the prior word is completed. Speach is of course a 1D stream of data (in time) but to parse the 2D CONTINUOUS visual field is nothing short of ASTOUNDING TALLENT any one year old child can do. Before you get too swell headed about this fact, note a new born cow (and many others that must follow their mother to feed) can do that when less than one hour old! ------------------------- *Does not "emerge" after many stages of neural computations, as is the standard, but wrong, POV of cognitive science. I am a cognitive science crackpot, CSC, and proud of it. In speach case as with visual experience, it is also part of the real time simulation. Not only real time when speach is concerned, but even "future projected" simulation as you often know the next word before it is spoken, and can hear words that were not spoken (when cut from the tape recording and their time slot is replaced by "white noise" ) etc. "Emergent computational transforms of sensory inputs" - don't make me laugh.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
