You’ve heard of optical illusions (and I’m sure experienced them), but have you heard of auditory illusions? Just like our eyes, our ears can be tricked into hearing things that aren’t there… here are 3 of the coolest auditory illusions, can your ears be tricked?

What are Auditory Illusions

Hearing is subjective; that’s right, what you perceive may differ from person to person. These illusions, which are auditory stimuli that seem real but are not, are a great example of how different our perceptions can be. These centuries old illusions are all around us but most of us don’t realize and the results are pretty amazing!

A simple example is hearing song lyrics. I’m sure we’ve all experienced singing along to the radio to find out we’ve heard the lyric wrong or been saying it wrong for a while. It’s all about what your brain expects to hear and fills in the blanks for you.

Here are some other Auditory Illusions to try out.

The McGurk Effect

One of the best-known auditory illusions is the McGurk Effect. This phenomenon demonstrates the power of visual cues on auditory perception. To put it simply, what you see and what you hear aren’t necessarily the same. Check it out…

In conversation, the visual input of how words look on the mouth impacts how we hear them. This is why talking face-to-face is best for those with hearing loss or even just having important conversations.

The Shepard Illusion

The Shepard Illusion is one of several tonal illusions that even make my brain hurt! In the Shepard Illusion, you hear two tones that appear to be rising or falling in pitch, and they keep going… forever, or so it seems. In reality, the notes aren’t changing at all, but are being repeated. This is achieved as the two towns are one octave apart and slightly overlapped, creating the sensation of movement up or down the scale.

Other examples of tonal or movement illusions are the Tritone Paradox and Risset Rhythm. All these illusions are in music, film score, and other sound fields; one purpose is to create suspense! Our brain interprets the changes as movement as it tries to make sense of what it’s hearing by filling in the gaps. Check out the videos below to see them in action!

Talking Piano

This is a weird one, so buckle up. We’ve all heard a piano played or just randomly, when provided context, a word, song lyrics, etc. we can hear the piano talking from those random keys. Ya, crazy I know, but true. Our brains are always trying to make sense of what is going on around us using what it already understands, like language and past experiences. So when the context is given our brains are primed with certain information so it interprets the sound using that. Hearing is believing for this one…

ASAPScience demonstrates these and several other illusions beautifully!

Internet Trends Auditory Edition

These two sound clips circulated the internet for weeks in 2018 and 2020, sparking some heated debates! In the first one you either hear Yanny or Laurel, in the second Brainstorm or Green Needle (why those words I couldn’t tell you). The sound information presented in the clips gets interpreted by the brain and can be primed one way based on what you read. What do you hear?

What can auditory illusions tell us?

Auditory illusions are not just fun, they also demonstrate the subjectivity of hearing. Two people can hear the same sound and perceive it totally differently! The same goes for hearing loss; not everyone’s hearing levels are the same, and even if they are, their perception of sound may be very different. Hearing is not a one-size-fits-all sense. So, did I trick you? Let me know in the comments!