Audio Myths Workshop Video

[CarlSeibert]

She's dizzying. Every time I glance away, she turns around. Which play into my impression of the OP video. But that post will take a while. Back later.

[mypasswordis]

She's dizzying. Every time I glance away, she turns around.

Damn that vixen, always playing games with our minds.

[Knuckledragger]

This British fellow did a series of videos on perception.

He really should have his own television show. His voice is hypnotically calming.

[Dusty Chalk]

And there's something 'win' about his choice of props, too.

[n3rdling]

Carlos is badass

[spritzer]

I just watched it again and I love their bewilderment about the audiophile power cords and filters. I must say though that, while clearly nuts along with 1000 hour burn-in for CDP's, there is a lot of junk on the mains today. Have any of you looked inside the chargers/power bricks inside the various appliances or just ripped apart one of those "green" light bulbs? Truly nasty stuff there...

[CarlSeibert]

That Satan thing Poppy Crum was flat out amazing. It pretty much showed that the power of suggestion is lot stronger than a lot of us (myself included) would like to believe.

I didn't find it surprising or scary. It's just how things work. It's not a sign of weakness.

We listen for meaning, not sounds. Our brains try to fill in the missing information. If two inputs are out of whack, we try to reconcile them. If you relax, give it some time and trust your instincts and common sense you'll be fine and make the right decision.

There are some theatrical elements that make this gag work. One is brevity. Your brain will eventually realize the two signals are out of sync and send up a flare. For me, the illusion didn't hold up to the end of the bite. I'd never heard it before. When I realized that I could "hear" the words, I thought "Cool!", got about two lines, then the audio turned to noise. Another part of the illusion is to make it a challenge. Your brain is busy trying to find the trick. That makes you distracted, sops up your brain cycles, and basically turns off the intuitive part of your mind that's more likely to see through the illusion. That gives the performer (or con artist or whatever) a little more time before common sense ruins the illusion.

Often, I can "understand" a language I can't speak in a movie with subtitles. If I'm drawn into the plot, the illusion holds. if the movie sucks, it's just a bunch of people talking in French with writing underneath.

For a lot of people, speaker rigs image better in low light. For me, in bright light, with my glasses on, phantom images tend to glue themselves to the wall behind the speakers if the slightest little thing happens the break the illusion. For a lot of people, the images will stick to the speakers themselves.

The bicyclists here probably know about the two blank spots that everybody has in their vision. Most people don't even know they're there. Your brain paints image over them. They're big enough to hide a car in, And if you glance over your shoulder, the image your brain paints in isn't a live picture from your other eye, but a made-up one. Slightly off-topic, but I mention it because if by chance anybody hasn't heard - forewarned beats being roadkill.

Not necessarily new but nice to see that "JJ" says if you know the two are different then you'll hear a difference. Having a long time to compare isn't going to make your comparison any more effective.

I disagree big time. Ethan did say so. He also said that there was no need to use different kinds of music. Maybe in the confines of a single pseudo-objective experiment (which generally don’t work, anyway, but who’s counting). Even then, you would need to repeat the entire experiment with different recordings and different kinds of music unless you want a system that is convincing only with ‘Jazz at the Pawnshop’. But in general, no way. Especially after Ethan’s own presentation presented convincing evidence to the contrary.

Think about that terrifying and tragic (but realistic) identification exercise. Identifying people is a good analog for identifying differences in sound, except that when you identify people, the results aren’t open to debate. You’re either right or you’re wrong. Moreover, it’s part of my trade. I’ve done it tens of thousands of times. If you intend to stay employable, you’d better be ready to do it correctly several thousand times in a row. I can speak with some authority here.

There are basically two ways to identify somebody, and they don’t mix very well. You can do it one way or the other. Try to fudge them together and it’s just not going to work. One method is what most people would consider “real” recognition. It’s done instinctively, subconsciously. You interact with somebody over a long period of time. You collect thousands and thousands of data points. When you see a person you can recognize, your sub-conscious parses all that data somehow and you know who they are instantly. Even a fleeting glimpse of the person will do. It’s deadly accurate.

The other method seems, at least subjectively, sort of "objective”. You match data points like you would if you were comparing fingerprints. You look for data points that can be expressed literally. You write them down or memorize them as literal concepts. A few gifted or highly trained people aside, your visual memory is for shit. It's only good for stuff like this for maybe a minute. Beyond that, it’s basically worthless. The problem is that you can only collect and use a handful of data points. This method is only good to differentiate people in a small pool of candidates. It fails often, and when it does work, it’s still pretty uncertain. All that said, if you don’t have the benefit of time to form sub-conscious impressions, the “objective” method is what you’re stuck with. You have to accept its limitations and that’s that. It’s a pretty blunt instrument. It will work to keep ten guys in a pick-up basketball game straight, but you would have a hard time recognizing a family member at the airport with it.

Think about the demonstration. Do you think somebody who had spent a significant amount of time with the fellow who played the purse snatcher (his girlfriend, let’s say) would be fooled by the photo lineup? Of course not. Girl Friend would have recognized him instantly. No way she would have been coerced into picking him out of a lineup he wasn’t in.

Put subjective perception in a short time frame, try to force some "objectivity" and throw in a little stress and this is what you get. The subjects “identified” a totally spurious person. This test “proved” there is no discernible difference between blond hair and dark brown hair.* I can just hear some blowhard on HydrogenAudio insulting the guy who claims to prefer blonds. It doesn't mean that humans can't tell the difference between blonds and brunettes, tubes or transistors, or whatever. It just means that they can't do it under those conditions. Which are pretty much what you get when you try to listen "for" something in the short term. In a situation where you don't have access to your sub conscious or common sense a difference has to be huge to rise above the noise.

You can dress up your test with "scientific" trappings. Make it blind, double blind, deaf and dumb, whatever. But what you're really working with is just a subjective hunch. All the "objective" window dressing just makes it even worse by adding to the noise.

If we want the certitude of "scientific", we should stick to measurements we can make with objective instruments. But a lot of times, we can't measure enough to have actionable conclusions.

If we need better, we've got our own perceptions and common sense, which will work if we let them. At the end, what we have is still just an opinion of course, but hopefully, it can be reliable enough to be actionable.

I guess why this has turning into an outright rant is that it workshops and speeches like this come off a little as people claiming "my mythology is better than yours" and laughing at people who are really no crazier than they are, rather than trying to take things as they are and make the best of them. Lest anybody take that as a flame on Ethan, I should point out that anybody who has run into him on one of the acoustics boards knows him to be a bright, sensible and generous fellow. </end rant>

*Almost. What we saw was brown hair miss-characterized as blond or vice-versa. You'd have to run the test twice to “prove” there’s no perceptible difference. But that should be easy. Black for white, blond for brunette, male for female – from that sort of situation, those are common enough real-world errors. One of the more perplexing experiences I used to have when I worked as a news photographer was people I had never seen in my life “recognizing” me in a bar or some such and proceeding to tell me how great it was to talk to me at such and such an event that I never attended. (I guess we all look alike.) Occasionally, I knew the people my new long lost friends were confusing me with. Sometimes, it was other graying white guys, but my favorites were the fellow who had really spoken to a colleague who is about 5’5” tall – and 5' 5" wide, is bald as a cue ball, black, and Puerto Rican. Another time, my doppelganger was a young, swimsuit-edition-hot woman. If I ever reach the point when I confuse me for her, somebody please hit me with the big shovel.

That demonstration, or a variant of it, by the way, is standard fare for beginning reporting classes. The results are always spectacular, and hopefully make an appropriate impression on the students.

[Dreadhead]

[Tyll Hertsens]

Cool, thanks Graham. I can tell you it's annoying to no end to have people say, "Measurements don't mean anything."

[manaox2]

That experiment was also a part of the forensics course at the summer camp I worked at over last summer. A woman I worked with was the thief. Very few of the campers even guessed it was a woman when asked to describe the thief, most seemed very certain of their usually poor descriptions as well. I enjoyed the rant Carl.

[CarlSeibert]

That experiment was also a part of the forensics course at the summer camp I worked at over last summer. A woman I worked with was the thief. Very few of the campers even guessed it was a woman when asked to describe the thief, most seemed very certain of their usually poor descriptions as well. I enjoyed the rant Carl.

Then spend some time in criminal court and they do it there, too, except it's.... real..... gulp! It's pretty sad, really. People just don't get it.