"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
13 July 2009
An audio illusion
Click this video to play it. When it finishes, click the "replay" button. Your mind will think that the sounds are continuing to rise along the musical scale, whereas in reality it's absolutely the same tonal sequence repeated.
Seems to me that there are a series of progressions recorded in the track. The listener's brain picks up on the next rung up. It is a trick, but the progression is there when repeated. I only tried it three times, so I wonder if there is a point at which your brain quits playing along?
Sounds like a discrete "shepard tone".
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
I like this visual: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igG_SNHHK58
ReplyDeleteI played it 5 times, and it never blew up ;)
ReplyDeleteThere's an even eerier audio on the Wikipedia "Shepard tone" page, up in the right-hand corner.
ReplyDeleteMan, I can usually deal with visual illusions, but audio illusions freak me out! And I can't make any sense of the explanations, either.
Seems to me that there are a series of progressions recorded in the track. The listener's brain picks up on the next rung up. It is a trick, but the progression is there when repeated. I only tried it three times, so I wonder if there is a point at which your brain quits playing along?
ReplyDelete