Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Groxx 1039 days ago
This sounds like it might be conflating stuff like vibrato (human-fast variation in pitch) or even faster. The illusion in the post and on the Wikipedia page involves changing the tone only four times per second, there's no claims at all about both tones blending together or producing only a single note.

Both are quite clear about different ears hearing different things, and hearing two or more tones.

1 comments

I’m referring to the perceived sounds. They aren’t blended together. I’m fully aware of what vibrato is and what the post is talking about in terms of changing tone, half tones, auditory phantoms, trichords, and the octave illusion. The Wikipedia page details the phenomenon with stepping and alternating but it’s not the end of it. Various intervals have been tested. Us musicians have been playing with this for a while now.
This whole thread is about the octave illusion, which is a very specific subset of psychoacoustics, and AFAICT the post accurately summarizes it as:

>There is one octave between the tones. If the alternation is short enough, you will hear the higher tone in one ear and the lower in the other.

No changes. Handedness of sounds that already exist.