The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Anyway, Murch put a lot of his thoughts about both editing and sound into a book called 'In the Blink of an Eye', which is still read by film students today. One passage that always stuck with me is an informal rule that Murch gave himself after he discovered something odd about the interplay between sound and audience immersion. After a lot of experimentaiton, Murch found that in any 'moment' of a film (say 3 - 7 seconds), an audience can only process 2-3 layers of sound playing at once.
For example, Michael Corleone goes to meet Moe Greene and they're walking through the lobby. We hear footsteps, the elevator ding, and the atmos of the hotel. If Murch had added the sound of he luggage of the bell-boys or some guests arguing in the rooms, it would be too overwhelming for us and the verisimilitude of the film would become compromised.
I guess I'm mentioning Murch because this informal sound rule was always independent of speech from the actors, which he doesn't treat as a layer of sound. To me, this may be a very practical example of what these researchers seem to be finding: that there is indeed some parallel processing going on with speech and sound in our auditory cortex.
I always find it very noticeable when it I see it. There's something jarring about it, the experience is somehow very different from a real multiparty conversation, possibly because it's impossible (for me) to focus my attention on any one speaker. That may be deliberate, of course, although often these scenes include key information in the overlapping dialogues.
It's a technique I never see in modern film/TV.
X X X X
and
X X X X X
How many are in the first? How many in the second?
It's my rule of thumb that all human pre-attentive processing can handle 4s at the pre-attentive level, and 5s+ require cognitive engagement.
This sound rule here seems to be the same: voice + 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing
Also, it's apparently not restricted to counting:
> A 2006 study demonstrated that subitizing and counting are not restricted to visual perception, but also extend to tactile perception, when observers had to name the number of stimulated fingertips.[7] A 2008 study also demonstrated subitizing and counting in auditory perception.[8] Even though the existence of subitizing in tactile perception has been questioned,[9] this effect has been replicated many times and can be therefore considered as robust.[10][11][12] The subitizing effect has also been obtained in tactile perception with congenitally blind adults.[13] Together, these findings support the idea that subitizing is a general perceptual mechanism extending to auditory and tactile processing.
I can reliably recognize up to 6 in most cases.
I wonder if that has something to do with it
Sometimes I have to take a step back and not feel like I'm reading into hardware specs when I see titles like these. But then it becomes so fun to pretend that this is all just a hardware sleeve for our own spirits/souls [1].
[1] Pretending they do exist is quite fun :)
Someday this research might people with the same issues.
Get a full audiogram and also ask them to look for cookie bite hearing loss. It's fixable.
Link says:
>> There is no cure for APD but there are things that can help.
I'm fairly sure I have this on top of regular hearing impairment. I've actually been through the NHS process and seen the graph that shows dramatic rolloff in my hearing above about 6kHz, and have a pair of NHS hearing aids.
I've not worn them since the start of the pandemic because I've not been in a crowded space with lots of people talking.
(Interestingly, because videoconferencing technology copes badly with multiple speakers and very rarely has proper working spatial audio, suddenly people with normal hearing can't disambiguate speakers either and everyone ends up rigidly taking turns)
I remember reading that it had to do with how I processed language and sounds, and that there was no real cure yet as a few years ago.
The last couple years has made it far less of a problem but as we start to return to normal (eventually) I'd love to figure it out. I tend to feel bad sitting through a conversation where I'm only hearing about a third of what others are saying.
I suspect it is largely anxiety related. I’ve had moments where lyrics are crystal clear, after smoking weed, so I don’t think it is a hearing thing.
Interesting point about music. I'm terrible at remembering the words to songs, but just fine with melody and rhythm.
It could very much have an anxiety or ADHD element to it.
I suspect that, for most of us, unless we get consciously involved, what we're most attracted to is the most pleasing or exciting or interesting 'channel'. (In the case of pop music, maybe we're more enchanted by the singer - or the 'message' - and the music be damned.)
In much non-vocal, 'purely' orchestral music, the melody is the attention getter, and all the other notes might be treated as 'just the support group'. Some conductors work hard to bring out the best parts of that support. (A lot of weaker melodies are strongly dependent on how they're harmonized.)
I was a proband in an fMRI study that played German and Polish fricatives (s and sh sounds) and measured the responses of different parts of the brain: https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/2612
When a native German speaker listens to German fricatives, the same parts of the brain flare up as when a native Polish speaker listens to Polish fricatives.
But when the other language is played, different parts of the brain get active.
I found out about 3 years ago that I write better backwards than forwards (like Leonardo). It is partly mechanical (I'm left handed) but partly something to do with how I process information. My forwards handwriting gets really bad -- I find my backwards handwriting easier to read. I have no problem keeping my letters going in the right direction when I'm writing backwards -- I'm better at it than when writing forwards -- except for numbers.
Numbers are, for whatever reason, very hard to write in the right direction for me (honestly, forwards too), though reasoning about calculus and graphs is far easier backwards.
Anyway, I'm still trying to figure that out. I think it is that our minds are coded to pick out language, so that pattern matching isn't so hard, but less capable of decoding numbers and reasoning about them.
At least for me.
It's something about processing linear information -- left to right each unit is discreet and separated from everything else, right to left I can reason about it as a smooth motion.
I don't know if this adds any clarity.
For the same dialog, a film can convey an entirely different plot intent purely through the accompanying music.
Without the music, it takes longer to decode the dialog.
With the music, even if the words are difficult to decipher the audience knows what is happening.
"C'mon, hound, I hear the coyote howl too but we're not hunting tonight" and they'll slink back reluctantly with the ears perked the whole way.