Little Kitten – Carmina Beeranda

Just a quick one here -- Richard Wiseman recently posted yet another one of those Carmina Buranda parodies, which if you checked A Blog Around The Clock in January, you would have seen a distinctly squidy-version already.

Whilst I’ve written about audio illusions before, with a more academically-minded post called Going Backwards, which talks about backmasking, cognitive bias and how I prefer to use the comedy stylings of the very, very clever Buffalax and Adam Buxton to demonstrate how we’re fooled -- it’s still a fun song to play with.

‘Carl’, a very perceptive commentator who also checked out Wiseman’s blog, kindly posted a link to a Scientific American podcast ep about the McGurk effect:

If we watch a video of a person mouthing the word “ga,” but have a synced voice-over of that person saying “ba,” what we end up hearing, is a third variation that’s never been said! That word is “da”.

And even though you now know it’s an illusion—you will still, when you see the video, think you are hearing “da”. But if you close your eyes, and do not see the person’s lips forming the word “ga,” you’ll hear what they are actually saying, which is “ba”. We think of speech as dependent on auditory perception. But this study eerily shows just how important visual input is.

Well, you might like to check out my fave interpretation of that particular song. Yes, it is apparently filmed in the land where Lord of the Rings was filmed. Carlton Draft, you win.

Tagged as: audio illusion, audio illusions, auditory illusion, beer, Blog Around the Clock, Carlton Draft, Carmina Burana, Carmina Buranda, it's a big ad, made of beer, mcGurk effect, parody, Richard Wiseman, science blogs