off topic...or IS it?

[terryj]

a pretty cool illusion I just came across, you may have seen it before but it was new to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aJlX0AEWys&feature=related

Ok, so this one deals with vision, but it is amazingly powerful! Rather than a magic trick or somesuch, this one works because of OUR preconceived ideas of the world around us, and it is amazing just WHAT we are willing to sacrifice in order to maintain them.

So this is in the off topic area, but really, it begs the question of how a phenomenon like this may work in audio too.

Anyway, I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

So you think it might be possible that we often hear what we expect to hear instead of what is actually there? Well, civilians do. Audiophiles? Never. Even when AB/X tested, the test is faulty unless the results support our beliefs.

P

 

[MC352]

I am definitely returning those $10,000 1 meter power cords after seeing this. !

That was very interesting.

 

[JackD201]

Nice link Terry I think it is very related. Mono, Stereo and Multi-channel, like the room in this clip, are deliberately engineered to fool the senses. If there is any debate to be had, it should be about what does the job better. Not to debate what is "real". Heck it isn't. To deny that it's all really an illusion would be IMO delusional. I mean, what is actually there if it isn't what you hear? It certainly isn't a real musician, band or orchestra. It will always be a copy or imaginary construct....the aural equivalent of a visual effect.

Leave a 10 year old with an application like photo booth and it won't be very long before he or she will start picking up objects and playing with relative scale. It is one of the most basic principles for visual effects employed since light first met plate. This BBC piece is fantastic to me. Move that camera even just an inch and the illusion will collapse on itself. The same can be said about the misalignment of a loudspeaker or the thousands of other factors that make a system better or worse at its job.

 

[Ron Party]

Jack, when are you coming to the Bay Area? I gotta meet you and share some fine tequila with you.

 

[terryj]

Nice link Terry I think it is very related. Mono, Stereo and Multi-channel, like the room in this clip, are deliberately engineered to fool the senses. If there is any debate to be had, it should be about what does the job better. Not to debate what is "real". Heck it isn't. To deny that it's all really an illusion would be IMO delusional. I mean, what is actually there if it isn't what you hear? It certainly isn't a real musician, band or orchestra. It will always be a copy or imaginary construct....the aural equivalent of a visual effect.

Leave a 10 year old with an application like photo booth and it won't be very long before he or she will start picking up objects and playing with relative scale. It is one of the most basic principles for visual effects employed since light first met plate. This BBC piece is fantastic to me. Move that camera even just an inch and the illusion will collapse on itself. The same can be said about the misalignment of a loudspeaker or the thousands of other factors that make a system better or worse at its job.

You're spot on jack with the 'move a mm and it will destroy the illusion'.

There is a better clip than that. I first saw it in a BBC doco (BTW it is called an ames room) but it is in the middle of a ten minute segment you see on videos (when they break the doco down into six sections type of thing) so it was a bit unwieldy to post. Instead I just linked a good short segment.

The beauty of that other one WAS that it explained it all, it did go to the other angle and it was suddenly clear how it all worked.

TBH I was not pushing too hard about us fooling ourselves with what we hear in sighted conditions, this seems to be yo be fundamentally different than that.

You raised a point I had not considered, maybe stereo ONLY works because oi a similar audio brain 'thing'.

If so, then we are glad our brains work the way they do! Good points jack, thanks.

What still amazes me is that we are more willing to have the girls change size (ie somehow that is more natural) than decide the room is out. Tho, as you say we cannot see the room is out from that angle...

 

[JackD201]

I'll be in the Bay Area from the 7th to the 18th of November Ron. I'd love to meet you guys! I also have never tried anything better than Patron, poor me, so that's one heck of an added incentive as if listening to your systems and favorite tracks wasn't incentive enough!

 

[JackD201]

Hi Terry,

I was teasing Ponk about the sighted thing. P and I like horsing around in the most oblique ways. It's all good fun

When I was studying audio post for film and tv, I got to play around with a lot of the tools engineers use. Next to mixing it was probably the most fun I've ever had at a desk of any kind. Methinks in my past life I was a lumberjack or something because I almost always prefer being outdoors. From an audio effects perspective, one gets exposed to a lot of ways to fool the viewer that what he's hearing actually belongs with what he's seeing.

For all of it to work you've got to manipulate interaural time and level differences. For example to make a recorded sound of a gunshot sound as if a sniper had fired it from 300 yards away you'd start by rolling off a bit of the high frequencies, lowering the level of the shot, adding an echo made up of the lower frequencies and adjusting the level of each echo to get gradually louder then softer. For added effect add the sound of the round whizzing past with some doppler thrown in. The more echos and level gradations the farther away. To make it sound like a point of view gunshot, you ramp up the leading transients, have the echos only in descending levels and could go as far as adding some artificial ear ringing. It's the audio equivalent of relative scale. You gotta love it!

What's fascinating is that in a domestic sound system with no way to directly manipulate the signal, there are still so many tools at our disposal and many of them cost only a few calories of exertion

 

[terryj]

was talking to an audio engineer one day...he gave us a tour of the studio that type of thing...and we were watching a film clip of a song. At one point in the track the camera zoomed in on a campfire (this was not finished IIRC) and it did not seem right.

anyway, it turned out that for the finished product you needed to ADD *that* amount of fire noise to the video! Ie, not in the song as far as I know, but for the video it is needed. He mentioned the same thing has to happen when you watch a classical concert on video, if you have a close up of the solo violin you need to emphasise that bit slightly for it to be correct in the video.

No doubt I am butchering a lot of what he was saying, twas a while ago now, but it seems to dovetail into what you just mentioned.

I'm still pondering why we trade one set of 'truth' and 'reality' for another, just why we would rather believe the girls actually change size. What I reckon is important about this experiment is it shows us just how much our evolution was centred around survival, the need to act NOW. (purely my own musings)

If we were more like a 'computer' say, then when confronted with this situation we'd get an 'error message'...this does not make sense so I will give back nothing till we have enough data.

That however would not tie in very well with staying alive, so due to that need or urge the brain HAS to give us something, we cannot afford to be in some sort of ambivalent state.

That the room is a certain way takes precedence is still interesting. it leads to wondering just what the heirarchy is we have for reality?? What concept is top dog and can never be questioned, what is next down and so on.

I can imagine, for example, that one of our most basic datums is the 'solidity and unchanging' nature of the earth we walk on. And so extrapolating from that, I can also imagine that an earthquake would be an extremely profound and disturbing experience, much more so than other natural phenomena like storms or fire etc, which may be equally damaging in the material sense...yet far less damaging psychologically. After all we KNOW that winds can blow hard..yet for most of us the earth never is less than stable, something that is FIXED.

Just one way of wondering how the phenomenon shown in the video may play out in the real world.

 

[JackD201]

I agree 100% with your observations Terry. I think it is in the hierarchy that folks diverge a bit as I believe it is , in survival speak, dependent on where and how we've been burned along with all other collective experiences.

 

[flez007]

I totally agree, and this might also fuel an idea I have had for many years based on the fact that how we like our systems to reproduce music depends a lot on our early experiences with either live performances (even ones aunt playing piano at a family reunion) or audio equipment from ones relatives or friends. Our minds are shapped and involuntary manipulated by those facts.

 

[amirm]

I think folks know this but what fools the ear has nothing to do with what fools the eye.

 

[terryj]

true amir, but most people readily acknowledge the eye can be fooled (I know they did not really cut that lady in half) yet have this complete blindspot when it comes to their ears, somehow that sense alone is not being fooled by anything, 'if I hear it it is real'.

And I think this example is different again from either of the others in some important, very fundamental way.

It has really intrigued me!

 

[JackD201]

I think folks know this but what fools the ear has nothing to do with what fools the eye.

Agreed, but the eyes and ears can be fooled at the same time, and quite convincingly at that even for an unwilling or unsuspecting subject. They go through the same brain after all