Sound VS. Pictcure and forgiveness

W

wheatgrinder

Just rambling here.. thinking about why we forgive problems with the visuals, but seldom forgive sound problems.

I think this is because the two sensor systems are VERY different in operation. We often say "seeing" is like a camera, but in truth the vision system is NOTHING like a camera. Whereas the way we hear is very much like a micro-phonic system.

Try this: Hold your thumb up at arms length. Focus on the thumb nail. The amount of FOV covered by your thumb nails is the area of your eye with any decent resolution. The rest is VERY low res, to be almost indistinct. This is not perception but physical limitation. To get around this our eyes move in whats called "saccades" sorta of a randomized raster like motion. Our eyes dart around picking out details.

Now, quick, before you THINK about it.. try and picture what you saw the last time you blinked! You cant, generally our optic system does not ENCODE the blink. Nor does it encode the swish-pans that we SHOULD be seeing constantly as our eyes dart to and fro.. (Side note, some drugs seem to tweak on this.. can you say tracers dude!)

These two observations suggest that there is a lot of visual informaiton that is IGNORED or FILTERED by the visual system before it even gets into our brain.

Sound is not like that. What we hear is what we hear. Any filtering must take place IN THE brain, so we have more control over that filtering.

sound reasonable?


EDIT: Be careful, after reading this you will start noticing your blinks and the swish pans.. it will pass. :)
 
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I agree with a lot of what you are saying. Sound being muffled by being behind something is sort of equivalent to a blurry picture. Doppler is kinda like a sweeping pan. Excessive reflections are kinda like an overexposed image. But we're used to those things, so if something sounds muffled when it shouldn't, it rubs us the wrong way. It seems more wrong, and breaks the illusion.

Of course, I'd add to that bad sound can cause physical pain, which makes it harder to forgive.

Interesting stuff to think about.
 
A few things to consider...

Hearing is the very first sense to become active in a human fetus before taste, sight, smell and discriminating touch. That is why a newborn will react to familiar people, s/he is reacting to a voice/sound that it has learned to recognize while in the womb.

Your ears - unless you are deaf - are always working and providing information. You can close your eyes and completely block out what you are seeing; if you put your hands over your ears you only muffle the sound.

Your ears work even while you are asleep.

Your eyes only see what is in front of them, your ears can hear spherically - in other words your ears can hear and locate sounds left, right, front, back, up and down without you having to move your head.

Your body can also feel sound, especially low frequencies. At higher volume levels even mid-range frequencies can be felt.
 
I believe the root of this diff is that we are already filtering and adjusting what we see to fit our perceptions of what we THINK we should see. Our vision system simply discards lots of data, whats interesting is that not only does it filter what we see, but it filters our perception of time. If you don't "see" it when you blink, then what happened in that moment of time you blinked? Blinks are fast, but certainly you can "watch" someone else blinking and you perceive that it takes "some finite amount of time" to blink...

an average blink takes about 300ms. These are the reflex blinks, just the normal blinks you do every few seconds..

On average, a person blinks 16 times per minute. A 16 hour day = 15360 blinks

15360 X 300ms = 4608000ms or about 75 MINUTES!. You lose an HOUR A DAY just blinking..

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
Saccadic Masking...

A person may observe the saccadic masking effect by standing in front of a mirror and looking from one eye to the next (and vice versa). The subject will not experience any movement of the eyes nor any evidence that the optic nerve has momentarily ceased transmitting. Due to saccadic masking, the eye/brain system not only hides the eye movements from the individual but also hides the evidence that anything has been hidden. Of course, a second observer watching the experiment will see the subject's eyes moving back and forth. The function's main purpose is to prevent smearing of the image.


That tells me that lots of the data captured by the eye never makes it to the brain, or at least to the GPU part of the brain:)

Sound does not go through such processing and hence is more accurate when presented to the mind.

Our brains are wired to ignore visual discrepancies. Our brain is wired to pay close attention to audio discrepancies.

From a biological point of few we could imagine some survival advantages...
With limited processing capacity, discarding useless visual information assures that the important information gets through in time to do some good. If EVERYTHING that came into our eyes was processed, perhaps we would suffer lag...

Audio is much lower bandwidth data and we gain distinct survival advantage from processing all of it. The speed of sound is fast sure, but a few 10's of a second is often the difference between being eaten and not!

Ramble off.. lol
 
wheatgrinder said:
I believe the root of this diff is that we are already filtering and adjusting what we see to fit our perceptions of what we THINK we should see. Our vision system simply discards lots of data, whats interesting is that not only does it filter what we see, but it filters our perception of time.
Click to expand...
Don't we do exactly the same thing with sound?

You're sitting on a back porch talking with friends. Music is playing form
the other room, kids a playing with a barking dog in the yard and your
neighboor is mowing his lawn.

We will simply discard the music, the kids, the dog and the lawn mower
and hear the conversation.
 
directorik said:
Don't we do exactly the same thing with sound? You're sitting on a back porch talking with friends. Music is playing from the other room, kids a playing with a barking dog in the yard and your neighbor is mowing his lawn. We will simply discard the music, the kids, the dog and the lawn mower and hear the conversation.
Click to expand...

The answer is yes and no. It is less or more directed, depending upon the situation. We are always aware of sounds, even if it is just on a subliminal level. You still hear the music and mentally acknowledge a new song ("I love this song - turn it up!"). You are aware of small changes in the pace and tonality of the kids play, especially if you're a parent; parents seem to be on their feet and headed in the right direction even before their kid starts howling about a scraped knee or a broken toy. The lawnmower becomes a soporific monotone until it sputters or shuts down ("thank God he's done!").

Your ears act as a security system; you hear sounds and your mind catalogs them in terms of threat awareness. We are trained by both instinct and cultural conditioning to react to certain sounds, sounds that swing our head around and demand that our eyes pay attention. Instinct makes you react to the cry of a child; we're hard-wired to react to "child in danger." Culture makes you look to the source of a siren or other alarm.

Your eyes do not work the same way, sort of "out of sight, out of mind."
 
It's a lot easier to wake up someone with sound than with light, supporting the argument they are processed by our brains quite differently.

Sound = primal necessity.
Sight = a valuable luxury.
 
directorik said:
Don't we do exactly the same thing with sound?

You're sitting on a back porch talking with friends. Music is playing form
the other room, kids a playing with a barking dog in the yard and your
neighboor is mowing his lawn.

We will simply discard the music, the kids, the dog and the lawn mower
and hear the conversation.
Click to expand...

Yes, but in my first post I argue that we do sound filtering in our conscious mind, the vision system ( retina and optic nerves) are pre-procesing the visual data, discarding lots of it, and it never GETS to the higher levels of the mind. (not my theory by the way, seems to be factual)

Its very similar to compressed 4:2:0 color space, the data is just NOT there, no amount of post processing is going to make it come back. Audio is dumped into our heads uncompressed! Our minds do the filtering, not the sense organ.
 
This is an interesting conversation, but I'm not convinced of the original premise.

Who says we're more forgiving of bad video? I see no evidence of this. EVERYTHING matters, equally.

In my opinion, the only thing an audience is truly unforgiving of is poor storytelling. The importance of the heart trumps both eyes and ears.
 
A person who runs a film festival told me to make sure you have good sound, but not so good picture is usually okay. I can see that, because sound is more distractingly bad.
 
We could devise a test, a scientific experiment if you will.

The problem is subjectivity of the nature of what were testing.

"good" vs "bad" are often aesthetic choices.
 
anyone ever heard of the McGurk Effect?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypd5txtGdGw

Audio and visuals are forever tied together. Not sure if it relates directly to this discussion but IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.
 
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