Apr 16 2009
Speech to Song :: An Audio Illusion
Listen to this clip in its entirety:
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Now listen to the original sentence again:
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Assuming you fall within a reasonable part of the bell curve of humans, you heard the woman abruptly sing “sometimes behave so strangely” in the middle of the phrase. Listen to it again…and again…you cannot escape the singsong interpretation of those words now.
Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego first documented this phenomenon — the spontaneous translation by our brains of a spoken phrase to song when isolated and repeatedly looped — in a 1995 research study. Dr. Deutsch played a looped version of the phrase for eleven choir members and then asked them to reproduce what they heard. Here are their recollections:
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Playing the sentence just once for another set of singers generated these reproductions:
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This curiosity is not purely academic, as modern composers have been exploiting the effect for decades in their music. Steve Reich is probably the most notable example with pieces like “Different Trains” that derive much of their melodic content from the natural rhythms and pitch variations in speech recordings:
Related TOE posts:
- Multimodal Perception – The McGurk Effect
- Justin Bieber Song Slowed Down 800%
- Do You Know This Song?
- Songsmith Remixes Radiohead
- Raffles Place Ghost Sighting
| 21 responses so far |
do do dee doot doot dyoot doot
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
damnit .. this ’song’ is now firmly stuck in my head.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Ok, lets try it on reddit. What I hear sounded like "Sometimes behave so strangely" what about you guys?
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
This article was ripped off from the Radiolab episode "Music" from April, 2006. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segments/58272
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Interesting that this comment was not mirrored to the article.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Had not heard that program, but thanks for the link. Radiolab’s a cool program. The article was actually "ripped off" from Deutsch’s research page, which is linked in the post.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
upvoted even though it didn’t work on me. well, it kinda did, and I can see where she is coming from, but for me it was more of a rhythm thing. when I heard that line, my brain looped it and turned it into a house song, kinda.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Good to know. I had thought that Radiolab published it first but I was wrong.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I didn’t hear any singing. I was expecting something like the scrubs musical : (
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
So… basically… what they’re saying is that if you take a selection of sound and loop it at a regular interval our brains will associate that loop with the standard rhythms of music and, from that, recognize the changes in pitch and tone as musical. BRILLIANT! AMAZING! Give these boys a Nobel Prize, STAT!
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Yeah, I was going to say this. It seems kinda stupid to consider this to be an "illusion".
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
The speaker did sing a bit on that part, plus she added additional emphasis to those couple of words. I’ve heard it even on the first listen but then again my ears are trained to hear this shit. Also, you could probably assign every syllable from that whole sentence to a note, even though those notes are not so pronounced as on that "sometimes…" part. So I wouldn’t call it a phenomenon – we’re all more or less singing in our speech.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
True most people don’t realize that, even those who speak with a lot of enthusiasm or range. It’s funny trying to get people to sing and they tense up, but then tell them to pretend like they’re reading lines while overacting. It opens up a lot.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
That’s weird. I heard this.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
So what you’re saying is, something like this happened?
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
It didn’t work for me at first. Came here to read the comments and saw that it didn’t for some people too. So, fine… But then I realized maybe it’s because the radio in my place was on in the background. So I turned it off and listened to the 2nd clip. A what do you know, I could immediately hear the melody. That was quite a mindfuck…
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I think it’s rigged. The pause at the end of the loop fits perfectly to give the sample a good rhythm.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
Apparently I fall outside of the reasonable bell curve of humans :/
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I listened to it in a dead quiet room. I didn’t hear it. Listening to the people singing it made me laugh
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
FFS. At first I thought I didn’t notice it and that they should have played the plain clip first, becasue for all I know she could have been "singing" those words in the first place. Still, the "do do dee doot doot dyoot doot" is in my head
When I get home from work I’ll need to exorcise this demonic song by turning it into something. I bet that WATMM will have 10 other songs based on this in the next week.. 
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
I’m pretty sure that this “song” was in my nightmare last night. Or maybe I had a nightmare because I felt asleep watching a movie on the SciFi channel.