Originally published at: Astounding audio illusion reveals why our ears—and our perception—can't be trusted | Boing Boing
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Wooh, that’s weird. I can hear the singing change as I look at each different line of text.
Like a Stroop Effect, but for the ears.
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TBH I think our eyes fill in missing clues when the audio is less than perfectly clear. With better audio there would be less ambiguity.
Of course in real life, audio frequently is less than perfectly clear, so we often use our eyes to fill in the missing context. Or if we can’t see the speaker’s mouth we may hear something different from what’s said.
Many years ago a friend pointed out to me that when someone is talking to me I always watch their mouth, which I don’t think is common. Much later on I was diagnosed with a hearing disability and then it made sense - I had been using (and continue to use) my eyes as a crutch for my weak hearing. It makes a huge difference for me, but even for people with normal hearing I’m sure it helps in certain situations.
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That sounded to me most like a group of eastern Europeans saying in accented English, “That is a Martian.” Was that even one of the offered options in the list?
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I do know that a lot of our patrons who are elderly had problems during COVID when we were all masked up. They were probably doing the same thing, and being unable to watch our lips put a crimp in their understanding. It also happens on phone conversations with a bad connection.
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I wonder if it’s because I’m English and used to football chants that all I can hear, irrespective of what I am reading, is a bunch of people with slightly Northern accents chanting “That is embarrassing”
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Derbyshire.
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And ‘Olive’s a seal’.
(Brownie point for the first happy mutant to post the correct video.)
An expert would tell us which match and what triggered it. 
(And of course that is exactly what it was.)
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I closed my eyes and heard this: Locked in big bar scene.
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Listen more carefully, and you can hear that they are actually chanting, “Shit on the Villa!”
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Well that’s just embarrassing
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Our ears and perception can’t be trusted? Nonsense. We just don’t have conscious direct access to perceptions - they are always filtered through various layers of interpretation and processing. That is how we are able to make sense of the world at all, after all - direct conscious access to perceptions would mean literally every thing we ever experience would be entirely new to us. Which would be terrifying and incomprehensible. And interpretations are dependent on both personal experience, learning from others, and context.
As with this chant - if you’re at a football field where people are known to chant “that was embarrassing”, you’re more likely to interpret the messy garble of thousands of people shoutingaat the top of their lungs as being just that, rather than “lobsters in motion” or “bart Simpson bouncing”. And that is literally how all language works, ever. We only understand it because we can, from a host of cues both verbal and not, pretty accurately match what we hear with our internal library of words we know (or make guesses at words we don’t know), and from that infer what other people are saying. That this has the potential to go wrong in cases where it’s difficult to hear things clearly really shouldn’t be surprising, nor should it be surprising that written text - which is in this case far more clear than the chant - has the power to push our interpretations of what we’re hearing in various directions.
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Came here to say exactly the same thing.
I’m sure I’ve heard much better examples of this phenomenon, though can’t think where.
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But if you are not at the football field and are perhaps from another English-speaking country, or even from a region whose accents are very different, you are less likely to interpret it as just that.
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Ok - nobody bit. So I’ll tell you anyway.
When it comes to mondegreens, this is one of my personal favourites… so if you want to know who Olive is and why she’s a seal…
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Reminds me of the early flash videos where “Another one bites the dust” backwards supposedly comes out as “it’s fun to smoke marijuana”, or “Hit me baby one more time” comes out as “sleep with me, I’m not too young”. Or a load of “Stairway to heaven” being “Oh to my sweet satan”.
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Excellent stuff. A perfect example of what the original posted illustrated - and we don’t even need to see words written down to give us misleading cues, someone silently miming/lip-synching the wrong words is enough - see 5m7secs in.
ETA for USians not familiar with Peter Kay
His 2010–2011 stand-up comedy tour was recorded in the Guinness World Records as the most successful ever[3] selling over 1.2 million tickets.
…or just stick his name into a Youtube search box and get the tissues out.
Yeah I think that is one of the super powers that magicians and comedians share; the tools of suggestion, direction and misdirection.
For me a very interesting moment in the video is when a single audience member was so embedded in the ‘comedy audience’ context that she misfired a very inappropriate laugh that Kay used to great effect!
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… yes, that’s kind of the point of what I was saying, that our environment shapes our interpretations?
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