Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

Floyd said:
I don't know what causes this effect, but I was looking at an old photo yesterday and in the background you can see the curtains on the front bay window that look like they are nearly touching the floor, when in actual fact they are 7 inches off the ground;


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As long as the dog isn't also seven inches above the floor...

Photographs can be very deceptive. There's no frame of reference to judge distance - they flatten things out, which is why my gorgeous photographs of wonderful views turn out as just photos of fields.
 
catseye said:
As long as the dog isn't also seven inches above the floor...

Photographs can be very deceptive. There's no frame of reference to judge distance - they flatten things out, which is why my gorgeous photographs of wonderful views turn out as just photos of fields.
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It's just so difficult to believe that there is such a difference in the appearance of the length.
A couple of inches I could possibly understand.
 
Floyd said:
That's interesting.
MrsF hears 'hairy'.
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You need to shut up and let the good MrsF listen properly, then. And don't go sharing your private nicknames here...

Slightly more seriously, the Yanny/Laurel thing is obviously designed to be confusing - it's a muted clip, and our ears, trying to make sense, hear one or the other... or, indeed, "Hairy". If there was a clear audio of someone saying "yanny", "laurel" or "hairy", the vast majority of us would know exactly what was being said.
 
Peripart said:
You need to shut up and let the good MrsF listen properly, then. And don't go sharing your private nicknames here...

Slightly more seriously, the Yanny/Laurel thing is obviously designed to be confusing - it's a muted clip, and our ears, trying to make sense, hear one or the other... or, indeed, "Hairy". If there was a clear audio of someone saying "yanny", "laurel" or "hairy", the vast majority of us would know exactly what was being said.
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But that's the thing, it sounds perfectly clear to me.
I don't see how it's designed to be confusing.
 
Floyd said:
But that's the thing, it sounds perfectly clear to me.
I don't see how it's designed to be confusing.
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Just to jog my memory, I've listened to the infamous clip again (a man's voice, which is slightly odd, as I had remembered the voice as female!). For the record, I am hearing "laurel" and nothing else.

The clip has a bit of background noise (a quiet clicking/scratching), and the voice has a slightly processed sound to it, so I wonder whether some of the white noise is causing our ears to interpret it differently?
 
Floyd said:
But that's the thing, it sounds perfectly clear to me.
I don't see how it's designed to be confusing.
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There's a Wikipedia article on it here:
Yanny or Laurel - Wikipedia

Here's the "Scientific anlysis" section (I've stripped the references to ease the reading flow, but they're available in the link above):

On May 16, 2018, a report in The New York Times noted a spectrogram analysis confirmed how the extra sounds for "yanny" can be graphed in the mixed re-recording. The sounds were also simulated by combining syllables of the same Vocabulary.com voice saying the words "Yangtze" and "uncanny" as a mash-up of sounds which gave a similar spectrogram as the extra sounds graphed in the laurel re-recording.

Benjamin Munson, a professor of audiology at the University of Minnesota, suggested that "Yanny" can be heard in higher frequencies while "Laurel" can be heard in lower frequencies. Older people, whose ability to hear higher frequencies is more likely to have degraded, usually hear "Laurel". Kevin Franck, the director of audiology at the Boston hospital Massachusetts Eye and Ear says that the clip exists on a "perceptual boundary" and compared it to the Necker cube illusion. David Alais from the University of Sydney's school of psychology also compared the clip to the Necker cube or the face/vase illusion, calling it a "perceptually ambiguous stimulus". Brad Story, a professor of speech, language, and audiology at the University of Arizona said that the low quality of the recording creates ambiguity. Hans Rutger Bosker, psycholinguist and phonetician at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, showed that it is possible to make the same person hear the same audio clip differently by presenting it in different acoustic contexts: if one hears the ambiguous audio clip after a lead-in sentence without any high frequencies (>1000 Hz), this makes the higher frequencies in the following ambiguous audio clip stand out more, making people report "Yanny" where they previously may have heard "Laurel".
 
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SimonBurchell said:
There's a Wikipedia article on it here:
Yanny or Laurel - Wikipedia

Here's the "Scientific anlysis" section (I'e stripped the references to ease the reading flow, but they're available in the link above)...
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Thank you, that's actually quite interesting! Yes, I fall into the "older" category, and thus potentially not so sensitive to higher frequencies, but equally, I suspect my work laptop has fairly crummy speakers, which could also favour some frequencies over others.
 
SimonBurchell said:
There's a Wikipedia article on it here:
Yanny or Laurel - Wikipedia

Here's the "Scientific anlysis" section (I've stripped the references to ease the reading flow, but they're available in the link above):

On May 16, 2018, a report in The New York Times noted a spectrogram analysis confirmed how the extra sounds for "yanny" can be graphed in the mixed re-recording. The sounds were also simulated by combining syllables of the same Vocabulary.com voice saying the words "Yangtze" and "uncanny" as a mash-up of sounds which gave a similar spectrogram as the extra sounds graphed in the laurel re-recording.

Benjamin Munson, a professor of audiology at the University of Minnesota, suggested that "Yanny" can be heard in higher frequencies while "Laurel" can be heard in lower frequencies. Older people, whose ability to hear higher frequencies is more likely to have degraded, usually hear "Laurel". Kevin Franck, the director of audiology at the Boston hospital Massachusetts Eye and Ear says that the clip exists on a "perceptual boundary" and compared it to the Necker cube illusion. David Alais from the University of Sydney's school of psychology also compared the clip to the Necker cube or the face/vase illusion, calling it a "perceptually ambiguous stimulus". Brad Story, a professor of speech, language, and audiology at the University of Arizona said that the low quality of the recording creates ambiguity. Hans Rutger Bosker, psycholinguist and phonetician at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, showed that it is possible to make the same person hear the same audio clip differently by presenting it in different acoustic contexts: if one hears the ambiguous audio clip after a lead-in sentence without any high frequencies (>1000 Hz), this makes the higher frequencies in the following ambiguous audio clip stand out more, making people report "Yanny" where they previously may have heard "Laurel".
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I can only hear 'Laurel' on the clip that's on Wikipedia, but it is clean and undistorted.
A less-clear recording might produce all kinds of extra frequencies from a tinny speaker that would lead to perceptual ambiguities.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I can only hear 'Laurel' on the clip that's on Wikipedia, but it is clean and undistorted.
A less-clear recording might produce all kinds of extra frequencies from a tinny speaker that would lead to perceptual ambiguities.
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I just replayed it from the article and it sounded something like "yammy".
 
Regarding the laurel/yanny discussion, people don’t realize how much of our spoken communication involves us using facial cues, tone and mouth/lip movement to understand what is said. Think of how it is more difficult to follow a phone conversation (no face time). IMO there are more questions regarding clarification of what is being said. Also, think of watching television and when someone is speaking, but the camera is not facing them. Sometimes things are missed.

Yes, some people have hearing loss, but not everyone, and the wiki link provided by @SimonBurchell explains this idea. The quality of the sound is not controlled, and can’t be because people are hearing it on many different devices. If it were in a controlled setting, we would have a better idea of how different people might hear it.

This is kind of like the misleading example of the ugly dress (which we all agree:bthumbup:). It is a two dimensional photo of a sequinned dress. The camera cannot show the true “colour” of something that is reflecting light.
 
brownmane said:
Regarding the laurel/yanny discussion, people don’t realize how much of our spoken communication involves us using facial cues, tone and mouth/lip movement to understand what is said. Think of how it is more difficult to follow a phone conversation (no face time). IMO there are more questions regarding clarification of what is being said. Also, think of watching television and when someone is speaking, but the camera is not facing them. Sometimes things are missed.

Yes, some people have hearing loss, but not everyone, and the wiki link provided by @SimonBurchell explains this idea. The quality of the sound is not controlled, and can’t be because people are hearing it on many different devices. If it were in a controlled setting, we would have a better idea of how different people might hear it.

This is kind of like the misleading example of the ugly dress (which we all agree:bthumbup:). It is a two dimensional photo of a sequinned dress. The camera cannot show the true “colour” of something that is reflecting light.
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The McGurk effect;

 
RaM said:
Someone I know had a heart transplant about 5 weeks back, it all went
incredibly well and he is back home,
So what's strange or odd about that you may ask, well when he went
in he was left handed, when he came round after the opp he is right handed.

:dunno:
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That is the strangest thing I've ever heard -
Is this man still able to use his left hand normally? How can the muscles of the right hand suddenly react this way?
Wonder what the doctors / surgeons think of all this.
 
Swifty said:
I've just tried to say the word "Baa" starting with my top teeth on my bottom lip and and I can't physically pronounce the letter B. I can only manage an F or a V sound doing that anyway?. I don't get it?.
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The sound “baa” has not changed, only the person’s mouth shape. The audio is playing the sound and the video is running two different scenes with a person making the mouth shapes. Both audio and video are superimposed and played together. It is not someone speaking anything. That is the illusion.
 
Watched a depressingly "uggh" video about a demo yesterday in Altrincham, where two diametrically opposed political factions were squaring off against each other across a South Manchester/North Cheshire street.

Reflecting that given a choice, or if forced to choose, I'd be with Faction B rather than Faction A, although I do find a few people on "my" side of politics to be embarrassing, or hard work, or requiring diplomacy to speak to.

Above all, the lines from a Gerry Rafferty song rose up in my brain

"Clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you!"

I turn the radio on... and guess what....



(Politics, in very general unspecified terms, is incidental here and just provides a setting...)
 
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Re the hearing and losing sound in certain frequencies.

I have a very good friend, slightly older than me, who can't hear anything in lower frequencies and certain pitches. She's mostly all right with voices, but she can't hear a tractor working one field over. The other day she was telling me about the awful loss of wildlife in Britain (which is true) and how she used to hear cuckoos everywhere but now hasn't heard a single cuckoo for more than five years. Whereupon a cuckoo started 'cuckooing' madly in a nearby wood. I said 'well, there's one,' but she couldn't hear it. Which might explain it!
 
catseye said:
Re the hearing and losing sound in certain frequencies.

I have a very good friend, slightly older than me, who can't hear anything in lower frequencies and certain pitches. She's mostly all right with voices, but she can't hear a tractor working one field over. The other day she was telling me about the awful loss of wildlife in Britain (which is true) and how she used to hear cuckoos everywhere but now hasn't heard a single cuckoo for more than five years. Whereupon a cuckoo started 'cuckooing' madly in a nearby wood. I said 'well, there's one,' but she couldn't hear it. Which might explain it!
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Years ago my next door neighbour complained about my kids running up and down the stairs and slamming doors. This was strange as I was living alone at the time.

He'd finally given in to his own adult kids and had a hearing aid. Until he adjusted it he could hear everything in the street.
 
My incredibly complex V12 thing threw a total wobbler at the weekend just before we were to set off to a nice car event. Open the door to find the passenger seat had moved forward so far that no one could get in and was immovable. The drivers seat had moved so far back that even I at over 6 foot couldn't reach the pedals and it was also immovable. When we got back from the event I checked and found that the passenger seat was working normally and the following day the drivers seat was also working. I should really get rid but, just like my love of crisps, I can't give it up. Some therapy required methinks (and the car needs a good dose of looking at.)
 
I was on my delivery today and saw one of my customers on the other side of road and she waved at me. She wears a very distinctive hat that has a large brim on the front and a small one on the rear,she also has a very distinctive walk where her hip moves to the side as she walks. I waved back but we didn’t speak as it’s a wide road.
About five minutes later I was delivering on the other side of the road and saw her coming down the road again from the same direction I had just seen her. As she approached me I asked her if she’d forgotten something and had to go back home to get it. She didn’t know what I was talking about and said she’d just come out. I said but I just saw you and you waved at me. She insisted that she had just left her house. Even her clothes were the same,beige trousers and a white T shirt. Very odd.
 
Stillill said:
I was on my delivery today and saw one of my customers on the other side of road and she waved at me. She wears a very distinctive hat that has a large brim on the front and a small one on the rear,she also has a very distinctive walk where her hip moves to the side as she walks. I waved back but we didn’t speak as it’s a wide road.
About five minutes later I was delivering on the other side of the road and saw her coming down the road again from the same direction I had just seen her. As she approached me I asked her if she’d forgotten something and had to go back home to get it. She didn’t know what I was talking about and said she’d just come out. I said but I just saw you and you waved at me. She insisted that she had just left her house. Even her clothes were the same,beige trousers and a white T shirt. Very odd.
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Vardoger?
 
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