Auditory Illusions on CD
From Digg (which my recent post spurred me to figure out--it's actually very cool!) comes this link to a CD called Phantom Words and Other Curiosities. In the sample track posted on the site, I get a sort of vase/face illusion effect: it switches between "oh when" and "nowhere" (in a quasi-British accent). Come to think of it, I get these kind of illusions from any rhythmic noise a lot: the washing machine is one major culprit.
3 Comments:
Indeed, the human tendency to hear two distinct sounds in a rhythmic series weirds me out, too. Just this morning I was reading a poem by Sándor Weöres that mentions the "csipp, csepp" ("drip, drop") of melting icicles, and I thought "Well, why do our languages have two different words? Each sound in the succession doesn't really sound different from the last."
I think there are theories about pairs of onomatopoetic words that just differ in their vowels. Can't remember where I heard about this, but one of the main points is that usually (cross-linguistically) the higher/fronter vowel comes first, so drip/drop, pitter/patter, ding/dong, jibber/jabber, ping/pong, etc.
A couple of decades ago one of the MIT radio station DJ's said "Oh, the hell with it," and for the next two hours played a tape loop of someone saying the single word "okra". At the one-hour mark the endless stream of okra was broken for the legally-mandated station ID, which for that occasion was, "WMBR, Cambridge: All okra, all the time.".
Listening to the single identically-repeated word for a long time produced many odd perceptual effects; at times you could make yourself hear the clack as the speaker's tongue pulled away from his velum for the "k"-sound, and it was just a clack, not a k. Hard to describe.
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