Audio illusions of endless strange loops - mp3

Boing Boing notes three interesting "audio illusions"
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, April 17, 2007 2:23 PM
permalink Mighty Optical Illustions has three interesting audio files that play tricks on your ears.

(MP3) - This is a recording of Shepard's paradox synthesized by Jean-Claude Risset. Pairs of chords sound as if they are advancing up the scale, but in fact the starting pair of chords is the same as the finishing pair. If you loop this sample seamlessly then it should be impossible to tell where the sample begins and ends.

Falling bells (MP3) - This is a recording of a paradox where bells sound as if they are falling through space. As they fall their pitch seems to be getting lower, but in fact the pitch gets higher. If you loop this sample you will clearly see the pitch jump back down when the sample repeats. This reveals that the start pitch is obviously much lower than the finishing pitch.

Quickening Beat (MP3) - This recording is subtle. A drum beat sounds as if it is quickening in tempo, but the starting tempo is the same as this finishing tempo.

Link

At top - a classic optical illusion showing how "helpful" our eyes are at "correcting" what comes in to fit their mental model of how life should be and report it to you that way.

The dark gray square at the top was made by simply cutting out a section of the "light" gray square in the "shadow", and pasting it up in the white background area.

Your eyes "auto-correct" it for you to account for the "shadow."

I know this seems hard to believe, so do this" print out the picture, get a pair of scissors, and cut out the square in the shadow and slide it over to the edge,where it magically "changes color" and becomes dark. As you slide it "into" and "out of " the "shadow", the same square changes shade right in front of you.

This is just one of the thousands of things your perceptual system is doing to be "helpful" to you, including altering the way you perceive people around you, so that they fit your mental model of how things "should" be.

The same effect is at work if you're deep into depression, when your mind is "helpfully" coloring everything around you "depressing" before it shows it to you.

That's what makes prejudice or bias or depression so hard to detect and treat - they seem so "obvious" and "external" that you can't figure out that your eyes changed reality before they showed it to you.

Unfortunately, we use that same visual system for thinking and for seeing, so it also "helpfully" twists our thinking around to help us see what it "knows" it is we're "supposed" to be seeing.