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Filed under: Audio •Post Production •

Hearing What’s Not There

Ever wonder how magicians make a large object disappear, or a woman’s dress instantly change color?  According to a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, cognitive scientists have been wondering as well. The scholarly, footnoted article explains magic tricks in terms of the visual and neurological quirks they rely on. It credits The Amazing Randi, The Great Tomsoni, and Teller (of “Penn and…”) as co-authors. It’s visually oriented - as is a lot of magic - but abracadabra: Here on the audio side, we’ve been benefitting from that kind of research for years. You can benefit, too.

The article makes no bones about magic being primarily visual:

Much as early filmmakers experimented with editing techniques to determine which technique would communicate their intent most effectively, magicians have explored the techniques that most effectively divert attention or exploit the shortcomings of human vision…

But this is an audio blog, so I’ll cover equivalent audio techniques: How we use neurological and mathematical tricks to make data in an audio file disappear… without noticeably affecting the sound.

In other words, it’s about getting the most from mp3, AAC, and other techniques. This often means not doing what the audio programs’ menus seem to suggest. If you’ve got anything to do with moving audio on the Internet, these tricks will be helpful. Some of them also apply to movies and broadcast. (Did you know that Dolby theatrical releases are much more compressed than most 99 ¢ music downloads?)

It’s a big topic, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself. So I’m releasing this article in four parts over the next ten days or so:

• What’s going on inside your head when you hear things
• How psychoacoustic compression algorithms work
• How lossless compression shrinks an audio file without any changes… but only if you’ve got a powerful computer

• A few non-intuitive tricks that can streamline how you and your clients exhange audio over QuickTime.
  

On to part one.

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