Before hearing the sentence, the squiggly noises just sound
like squiggly noises. After hearing the sentence, the
squiggly noises sound (to me and presumably most people)
like a distorted version of the sentence. The only reason
the squiggly noises are there twice is so you don’t have to
replay the recording to hear the effect.
This blew me away the first time I heard it, and I already
knew what pareidolia
was.
This isn’t actually a case of pareidolia, as the squiggly noises (they call it “sine wave speech”) are in fact derived from the middle recording, using an effect that sounds, to me, most like an extremely low bitrate mp3 encoding. Reading up on how they produce the effect, it is in fact a very similar process to mp3 encoding. (Perhaps inspired by it? I believe most general audio codecs work on very similar basic principles.)
True; I suppose it’s a demonstration of the thing that makes pareidolia possible—the should-be-obvious-but-isn’t fact that pattern recognition takes place in the mind.
I ran into a set of these once before, and while it didn’t let me listen to any one noise more than once before hearing the related speech, after about 4 or 5 noise+speech+noise sets I started being able to recognize the words in the noise the first time through. So it does seem to be learnable, if that’s what you were curious about.
I’m curious how much of the change is because you’ve heard the sentence in “plaintext”, and how much because you’re hearing the squiggly version a second time.
No, I didn’t. I am a native English speaker from the Midwest part of America. I listened to it multiple times without hearing any speech in either of the sound effects.
After reading your comment, I listened to the audio again and now both audio samples do sound like a repeat of the speech. At no point did the audio samples sound different from one another, though.
The woman does have an English rather than American accent. I’m from England originally and the effect was quite dramatic the first time I listened to it: meaningless noise, then speech, then completely intelligible speech (the repeat of the original meaningless noise). The second time I listened to it some time later (after reading your comment) I could understand the speech in the first sound but it was clearer in the second. Listening to it again shortly afterwards the first and last sound both sounded like speech and sounded much the same as each other. I wonder whether the accent is a factor?
That’s very interesting. Can you try some of the other samples from Matt Davis’ page and report on your experiences?
When I listened to some of those the first time I was, as luck would have it, in a slightly noisy environment, so that I couldn’t quite catch some bits of the English text the first time around; the corresponding parts of the “sine wave speech” remained obscure for me until I had listened again to the clear text.
So for me the effect seems to be stronger rather than weaker as a result of the speaker’s accent plus English being a second language. I’m really puzzled as to why the effect might be weaker for you. Any ideas? Are you cognitively atypical in any way?
One reason I wished it had been two samples rather than one is that I thought I heard speech in the noise the first time, and wanted to listen again to see if I could figure it out without being primed.
This is the question I tried to answer elsewhere—After training on 4 or 5 samples I was able to hear the words in the remainder of the coded sentences the first time I heard them, without being primed by the decoded version of those sentences.
The first and last parts sounded exactly the same to me.
However, what “meaning” are you talking about? I got no meaning from the sound effects.
The recording is:
Squiggly noises
An English sentence
The same squiggly noises again
Before hearing the sentence, the squiggly noises just sound like squiggly noises. After hearing the sentence, the squiggly noises sound (to me and presumably most people) like a distorted version of the sentence. The only reason the squiggly noises are there twice is so you don’t have to replay the recording to hear the effect.
This blew me away the first time I heard it, and I already knew what pareidolia was.
This isn’t actually a case of pareidolia, as the squiggly noises (they call it “sine wave speech”) are in fact derived from the middle recording, using an effect that sounds, to me, most like an extremely low bitrate mp3 encoding. Reading up on how they produce the effect, it is in fact a very similar process to mp3 encoding. (Perhaps inspired by it? I believe most general audio codecs work on very similar basic principles.)
So it’s the opposite of pareidolia. It’s actually meaningful sound, but it looks random at first. Maybe we should call it ailodierap.
True; I suppose it’s a demonstration of the thing that makes pareidolia possible—the should-be-obvious-but-isn’t fact that pattern recognition takes place in the mind.
I wish it were two recordings, so you could listen to the squiggly noises more than once before hearing the sentence.
I ran into a set of these once before, and while it didn’t let me listen to any one noise more than once before hearing the related speech, after about 4 or 5 noise+speech+noise sets I started being able to recognize the words in the noise the first time through. So it does seem to be learnable, if that’s what you were curious about.
I’m curious how much of the change is because you’ve heard the sentence in “plaintext”, and how much because you’re hearing the squiggly version a second time.
You didn’t hear the second part as a repeat of the speech? Are you not a native English speaker?
No, I didn’t. I am a native English speaker from the Midwest part of America. I listened to it multiple times without hearing any speech in either of the sound effects.
After reading your comment, I listened to the audio again and now both audio samples do sound like a repeat of the speech. At no point did the audio samples sound different from one another, though.
The woman does have an English rather than American accent. I’m from England originally and the effect was quite dramatic the first time I listened to it: meaningless noise, then speech, then completely intelligible speech (the repeat of the original meaningless noise). The second time I listened to it some time later (after reading your comment) I could understand the speech in the first sound but it was clearer in the second. Listening to it again shortly afterwards the first and last sound both sounded like speech and sounded much the same as each other. I wonder whether the accent is a factor?
That’s very interesting. Can you try some of the other samples from Matt Davis’ page and report on your experiences?
When I listened to some of those the first time I was, as luck would have it, in a slightly noisy environment, so that I couldn’t quite catch some bits of the English text the first time around; the corresponding parts of the “sine wave speech” remained obscure for me until I had listened again to the clear text.
So for me the effect seems to be stronger rather than weaker as a result of the speaker’s accent plus English being a second language. I’m really puzzled as to why the effect might be weaker for you. Any ideas? Are you cognitively atypical in any way?
One reason I wished it had been two samples rather than one is that I thought I heard speech in the noise the first time, and wanted to listen again to see if I could figure it out without being primed.
This is the question I tried to answer elsewhere—After training on 4 or 5 samples I was able to hear the words in the remainder of the coded sentences the first time I heard them, without being primed by the decoded version of those sentences.
reads in more detail indeed—thanks!