Monday, June 11, 2018

McGurk Effect

With the whole Yanny/Laurel video I became interested in the McGurk Effect. I found this video on YouTube about audio illusions and if you can trust your ears. They start out with a video saying bar and then they make a same video but saying the word far. Then, they mute the far video and insert the sound from the bar video. You are still hearing bar but you are seeing far, so your brain interprets it as you hearing far. They also talk about how sound overrides your vision by doing an example with a circle, first they show you sound with video that beeps when the circle appears and you have to say how many times the circle appears, most would say twice, then, they show it without sound and you can see that the circle only appeared once. The video goes into detail about other sound illusions, the tritone paradox and the Shepard tone illusion. The Tritone paradox is when you play a pair of Shepard tones sequentially separated by a half octave. Then you have to guess is the sound descending or ascending, and everyone hears it differently, some hearing it go up and others down.The Shepard tone illusion is a sound consisting of sine waves on top of each other, then played with the bass pitch of the tone moving up or down, and it makes you believe that the sound is either getting higher or lower. I found the McGurk effect interesting when reading about ba, ga, and va, and how our eyes and ears can trick our brain into perceiving something different from what we are hearing.

1 comment:

  1. I never knew the McGurk Effect was associated with the Yanny/Laurel controversy, but now it makes so much sense!! It definitely makes sense how our eyes and ears think so differently, but at the same time and also they can trick our brain. There are so many things going on at once, it is insane to me!

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