Make auditory illusions technology1/22/2024 ![]() ![]() Researchers asked participants which silence felt longer-the combination of the first two periods of silence, or the longer, uninterrupted one. In the second half, one continuous period of silence cuts in. ![]() In the first half of the recording, the background noise is interrupted by two blips of silence. In one experiment, researchers played a recording that sounded like ambient noise in a crowded place. To get at this question about the nature of hearing, the researchers prepared seven experiments with three different perceptual illusions and tested them on 1,000 study participants, according to Scientific American. If silence isn’t really a sound, and yet it turns out that we can hear it, then hearing is more than just sound.” And yet it often feels like we can hear it. “Silence, whatever it is, is not a sound,” Firestone tells Scientific American’s Shayla Love. But philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have wondered whether we actually perceive silence or merely note the absence of noise. We experience noise when sound waves travel from our outer ear through our ear canal and rattle our eardrum. “This gives reason to suppose that silences are treated by the auditory system in the same way sounds are treated,” Nico Orlandi, a philosopher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the research, tells Science’s Claudia Lopez Lloreda. In the study, participants were tricked by these “silence illusions” in a similar way to how people are typically fooled by the sound versions of the experiments. “If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all,” Chaz Firestone, a co-author of the study and cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, says in a statement. In a new study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers examined how people experience silence using well-known auditory illusions. The illusions are meant to test the perception of noise, but for the study, the team adapted them to measure people’s response to silence, instead. Silence may not be a sound, but scientists say we can truly hear it. However, according to new research, our brains perceive them in the same way. From the roar of a crowd to the quiet of a library, sound and silence might seem like polar opposites. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |