Sdrawkcab gnikaeps

[arthwollipot]

Loved the backwards speaking episode. I played it twice, then replayed it for a friend, who also thought that it rocked.

[Bob Blaylock]

¿umop əpısdn ⊥noq∀ moH

[Syameese]

I got my wife to listen to the episode and she told me she heard the words in the sine-wave before hearing the prompts - and was amazed that I didn't!

I am going to test her out on the extra examples on Matt Davis' website to see if she can reproduce the feat under observation :D

[arthwollipot]

Yes, I could easily identify the first one before the prompt - but I'm accustomed to the English accent. I figure that someone who han't had a lot of exposure to English accents might not have been able to hear it. The second one was a little harder, but I still heard it. My friend also.

[GoodGuysEatPie]

It was a very cool episode. I plan to use it with my students.

If you like that auditory illusion stuff, you would love the research of Diana Deutsch (http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/). One of her specialties is musical illusions and paradoxes (http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/deutsch_research1.php).

[arthwollipot]

That looks fascinating. I'll definitly look into that.

[wafonso]

Still about auditory illusions, there was an episode of... I want to say This American Life, but I think it actually was RadioLab. One second, Googling...

Yes, it was RadioLab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21 The episode is technically about music, but there's a segment at the beginning exploring the perception of sound and the illusion of "music" in the spoken voice even when it's not there.

[Trevor]

Ya, those sinusoidal sounds were cool. Brains are neat. I was doing genomics research where we tried to find patterns in and make sense of tons of A, T,C, and Gs. My idea was to print out a decent chunk of data in a color-coded fashion and try to see patterns just by eyeballing it. And then, if we found any, try to back up our guesses with data confirming they were significant and not just imagined.

In a more broad sense, I think the pattern finding of the human mind is so powerful that it should be used as one of the many tools in analyzing data. And obviously these discoveries would mean little if they couldn't be confirmed by other methods.

Conversely, it would be an interesting to study how many times we assume patterns are significant but are actually just created in our minds.

In the move, The Matrix, they said humans were being used as batteries, which is pretty damn stupid considering how there are other animals who put out much more energy output than humans. But I think it would be feasible to use human brains for their processing power, which is much better at certain tasks than binary computers. That is a case where human brains would be better than any other animal.

[Trevor]

I took a college class called "The Physics of Music & Sound" and I found it interesting how sounds we just think sound nice together have physical reasons for the perception. Like a C, E, G chord has sound waves that share the same nodes and they are multiples of each other.

[arthwollipot]

What fascinated me is that sounds can be built up by overlapping sine waves. The most pure sound of all changes dramatically when mixed with different harmonics of itself.

[Trevor]

Ya, all sound, no matter how complex, is just composits of simple waves.