Can You Recognize the Mysterious Melody?

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To some extent, our brain is hearing what we are expecting to hear. A lot of what we perceive isn't actually us hearing sound waves hit our eardrum. It's prediction of what those waves should be. To illustrate this, diana uses something called the mysterious melody. This is a well known tune, but the notes are presented in different octaves. So instead of playing da rami in the same range with all the notes next to each other, you could play da rami with the notes jumping into a different range. The question is, can people recognize this melody? And in fact, people can't recognize the melody.

In the same way optical illusions trick our eyes, audio illusions can trick our ears. This raises a fundamental question: What is hearing, and how much of it is made up by our brains?

This is the first episode of our new six-part series, Making Sense.

You can find more of Diana Deutsch’s auditory illusions at https://bit.ly/3Mdh6H4, Matthew Winn's research at http://www.mattwinn.com/Research.html, and Mike Chorost's writing at https://michaelchorost.com

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