[Csnd] "hearing things" in white noise

Date	2010-01-03 09:06
From	Michael Mossey
Subject	[Csnd] "hearing things" in white noise
	I was recently using the 'noise' opcode to produce gentle white noise to cover up background sounds. What I discovered was that I "hear things" in it. I hear faint tones, voices, and music. I listened with high-resolution headphones and this was even more obvious. Other than being a premise for a horror movie, is there some reality to this, in the sense that the 'noise' opcode doesn't produce completely uncorrelated noise, so it will have faint tones in it? Or is this pure human perception/projection at work? Thanks, Mike Send bugs reports to this list. To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"

Date	2010-01-03 12:17
From	Peiman Khosravi
Subject	[Csnd] Re: "hearing things" in white noise
	Tony Conrad once mentioned this on a mailing list. Apart from that I know nothing about the subject. His post is below in red. Best, Peiman Exactly the difficulty: your deterministic (Shannon-like) model of communication (of reception) insufficiently accounts for listener variation, for the unlimited variability of interpretation made contextually inevitable, and even the fact that sounds may never "loose their identity as 'real' sounds." (There is a whole cult of people for instance who listen for signs of spirit voices or extraterrestrial signals in white noise.) "Spectromorphological listening" is of course possible, but is a learned practice, and must be regarded as largely independent of its source material. ------t0ny On 3 Jan 2010, at 09:06, Michael Mossey wrote: I was recently using the 'noise' opcode to produce gentle white noise to cover up background sounds. What I discovered was that I "hear things" in it. I hear faint tones, voices, and music. I listened with high-resolution headphones and this was even more obvious. Other than being a premise for a horror movie, is there some reality to this, in the sense that the 'noise' opcode doesn't produce completely uncorrelated noise, so it will have faint tones in it? Or is this pure human perception/projection at work? Thanks, Mike Send bugs reports to this list. To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe csound"