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.
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.