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Auditory Pareidolia With Repetitive Mechanical Sounds

severs1966

severs1966

open-minded empiricist
Joined
Apr 12, 2014
Messages
58
Location
West Yorkshire, England
We've all read about the innate and apparently evolutionarily useful tendency to see faces in whatever shapes and patterns we happen to be looking at, or even to see other things (especially when upset or stressed). It's well documented.

What's the name for when you hear words in non-verbal sounds?

I stayed in a rented countryside holiday cottage about 5 years ago. It had a smart little kitchenette/laundry room. I washed my clothes, and as the washing machine was doing its round-and-round washy thing, its mechanical sound really, really resembled a tenor male voice repeating "Shelve it! Shelve it! Shelve it!". This stopped when it went into rinse cycle and spin and so on.

Apart from my response, which was to wonder what the washer was commanding me to put onto a shelf, and which shelf that might be, I started to notice this in lots of other places and I now can't shift the tendency to hear words, especially faintly imperative phrases and commands, in any mechanical rhythmic sounds. It doesn't happen in other types of sounds, just repetitive ones.

Don't worry, none of these sounds has "commanded" me to do something scary, such as "kill them all" or anything like that.

Do others get this? What's the name or term for the effect?
 
It's called auditory pareidolia and I do believe we have threads on it.

Here's an article on it, from the reputable American Nautilus magazine blog -
Why We Hear Voices in Random Noise

Neil Bauman is an audiologist who runs a center in Pennsylvania called The Hearing Loss Help Center. He’s created a discussion forum for those experiencing a wide range of anomalous auditory perceptions including auditory pareidolia. Commenters detail their experiences, often believing they are symptomatic of mental illness. For example, one commenter writes: “I thought I was going crazy. When my air conditioner is on, I wake up and hear light conversations. I would go to the window to see if anyone was outside, or I would turn the air conditioner off [and] it would stop. Sometimes it sounds like a radio.”

Another, more at-ease commenter, writes about her similar experience of hearing voices from the sound of central air control: “I would hear faint voices—whispering, conversing, singing, or chanting! It sounded like a crowded room, full of people at a party in a distant room somewhere in the building. After a while I came to enjoy the sound, as they seemed to be enjoying themselves at the ‘party,’ and it helped lull me to sleep at night.”

These examples of auditory pareidolia might make you wonder what the sonic characteristics of natural speech are, and moreover, how the sound of an air conditioner—or any other noise-making object—could possibly resemble speech. At one point scientists were generally in agreement that the waveform characteristics essential for perceiving speech sounds were largely understood. That changed when a single study showed that speech could be perceived in sounds that did not contain any of these acoustic properties.
Click to expand...

That's an interesting article with plenty of safe links to further reading. Recommended.
 
Repetitive mechanical sounds lend themselves to parsing or translation as snippets of speech or recursive chanting. Once you perceive them that way (i.e., once you translate the mechanical sound into a faux utterance or chant) it's difficult to not hear the sound in that translated form.

During my first tour as a university student I had a work / study job as a clerk / typist in the English department, where I did most of the copying jobs for the instructors (e.g., hand-outs; exams). At the time (very early 1970s) photocopiers were expensive and reserved for high priority copy jobs, so most of the work was done on rotary drum mimeograph or ditto machines.

I spent a total of many hours shepherding our mimeograph through big jobs while it endlessly chanted "chuck-de-copy; chuck-de-copy ..."
 
My family word for this is shushy-pockle.

Family lore has it that it was first registered by my great grandmother on a steam train moving slowly between many stations in rural Lincolnshire!
 
Auditory pareidolia is useful to doctors. They listen for distinctive heart sounds, called 'gallops', that suggest the words Tennessee and Kentucky. So your Tennessee gallop might indicate a failing or hypertrophic left ventricle and the Kentucky gallop a case of congestive heart failure.
 
Just got a flashback to a really old joke:

A rich man has a butler called Worrall.
One evening he orders him "Worrall. Run me a bath".

As the rich guy is relaxing in his bath, he lets go an enormous underwater fart, but thinks nothing of it.

Later, while getting into bed, he burns his arse on a hot water bottle.

"Worrall! What's the meaning of this?"
He yells
"I didn't ask for a hot water bottle!"

"With respect" replies Worrall "as I passed by your bathroom door, I distinctly heard you say "Iwannahotworraborrolworrall" ...
 
STORY TIME!!!

At the very end of the 90s I was living in Swindon in a shared student house. It was Summer holiday but being poor and needing to work at a local bar job I stayed on in the house while my flatmates went back to their respective towns.

1st day on my own I settled down at the table in my room to draw, and 30 mins into it, I paused because I realised I could hear...something? it sounded like someone had mentioned my name at a whisper. I sat still, listening, and could just hear a hushed conversation going on. I looked outside expecting to see people out there, but the backyard was empty, I listened further, the voices were so low, almost conspiratorial I couldn't make much out but occasional snatches, jumbled sentences. Puzzled I carried on drawing but now my ears were straining. And I realised that they were saying things like "mummmmmmffmmm mumble mumble...Can he hear us? mumble mumble But that would be wrong mumble mumble But he musn't know!"

Worried now, I got up and walked around the shared areas of the house, The voice phenomenon seemed to be happening only in my room, Listening again, it seemed to have receded to a barely audible mutter with no discernible words. I sat down and started to carry on drawing but after 30 mins I realised I could make out sentences again and it was obvious a conversation by 2 people who were observing me. "mutter...He knows now, we have failed to hide our plan...mutter mutter mumble Then perhaps one of us could pretend to be [my flatmates name] and trick him"

Freaked out now, I made another circuit of the living room, kitchen, boiler room and bathroom shouting that if any of my flatmates where back to come out... Nothing. I was certain that as I couldn't locate the origin now, I was experiencing some kind of mental breakdown, I had vague ideas about calling a friend who was studying to be a nurse and asking him if he knew the symptoms of early onset Schizophrenia ! Instead I settled for turning my stereo on and playing music which drowned out the voices and carried on drawing.

I broke off to make a meal, and watched some TV downstairs, later headed to bed on switching my still playing stereo off I was faced with silence again for the first time in few hours. but the whispering returned...
Laid there, I forced myself to hardly breath catching what I could and trying to see if there was a direction this was coming from. The sentences seemed rambling, someone was talking about pudding, then something about cobbled streets? I found myself thinking it all sounded like coded Spy talk from a wartime film noir drama, when almost seconds later I heard one party say "Ha, We'll be Just like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca" That was impossible I thought!

I jumped up certain now I was hearing voices in my head, I could feel a panic setting in. I left my room, going to get a glass of water when stood in the hallway outside I stopped. In the late night still, I could hear something out here and it was coming from my flatmates room adjacent to mine! Breaking the unspoken rule of shared houses, I tried his room door, it opened...

Inside I found he had an old radio alarm clock, and the radio had come on, but the volume was set waaaay down at about a 3. even stood 2 feet away I could hardly hear it let alone make out what was being said. But it was on table against the wall that separated his room from mine.
Running back I found the lowest almost barely audible susurration made it through to my room. There was no way I was hearing actual dialogue (it was tuned to a talk sport station) but if I sort of let my hearing go out of focus, I could make sentences out of the noise. And I realised it was when I was not paying attention, my ears and brain must have been battling subliminally to make sense of this white noise and forcing it into these weird snatches of Chinese whispers. Once the radio was switched off everything stopped.

I am always a bit sketchy about stories of people hearing spectral voices now, as I have found out it's apparently very easy for your brain to quite convincingly fill in the gaps on background and white noise sounds.
 
mrpoultice said:
I am always a bit sketchy about stories of people hearing spectral voices now, as I have found out it's apparently very easy for your brain to quite convincingly fill in the gaps on background and white noise sounds.
Click to expand...

I'd noticed this before so when after recently getting my hearing aids the water running out of the tap started 'talking' I wasn't too alarmed! Mind you it is still a tad unerving even when you know what it is.

I really enjoyed your post mrpoultice :)

Sollywos x
 
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