Auditory Illusions: Hearing Lyrics Where There Are None

20,267,941

670,717 0

Published 2015-03-04

Was looking for a midi for a project, but I couldn't find the one I needed. Came across a website that promised to convert MP3s to midis, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Aside from the fact that the result sounded like a piano factory exploding, I also could have sworn I heard sung lyrics in it, even though the only midi track was a piano. Not sure how the converter works, but I guess the way vocals are recreated via piano is similar enough to the real song for our brains to mentally fill in the words where there aren't any. Maybe? Pianos usually don't talk.

Let me know how well you hear the lyrics, if at all, and what other songs you tried!

Stuff I used:

Converter- www.ofoct.com/audio-converter/convert-wav-or-mp3-o…

3D Midi visualizer- sourceforge.jp/projects/miditrail/

Midi instrument editor - www.synthfont.com/

The midis I made from the video: www.mediafire.com/?cds9m6ss88ew38h

All Comments (21)

@brynnaenae 4 years ago

The scariest part was when my hearing switched from hearing a bad piano to hearing words.
@gloom2261 3 years ago

Nobody: The $10 Airpods I got from Wish:
@ElvenSailor_Main 3 months ago

The voice sounds like a concert only you're in a bathroom throwing up and having a panic attack but can still hear the performance
@boredyoutubeuser 5 months ago

It's cool how we can discern human speech from sounds that don't have any at all, pretty neat!
@blumelein6332 3 years ago

Imagine a ghost trying to talk to you by possessing an old piano and doing this shit
@torilinncwanek1096 4 years ago

Alternative Title: Stayin Alive but I'm also falling down 47 flights of stairs
@TrashPanda-2112 4 months ago

Can we get a room with 20 pianists trying this "for science".
@nameismetatoo4591 4 months ago

Technically not an illusion, but rather a great demonstration of the Fourier series. Any sound, no matter how complex, can be represented by a combination of pure sine waves. The more sine waves, the closer to the original. These audio-to-midi programs just find a sum of sine waves to approximate the input audio, then each of those sine waves is mapped to a piano note.
@sibr2805 3 years ago

Nobody: Youtubers avoiding copyright:
@yesno5095 4 years ago

“Piano Man” but Billy’s literally a piano man.
@AquaComputerVR 5 months ago

this is so uncanny. Hearing the sound and recognizing it as human without hearing the words is very eerie
@EzraEpic 5 months ago

This video is once again being recommended to people again
@AtypicalDC 4 years ago

"Oh, you listen to piano? What kind of genre?" "You wouldn't get it."
@dexter5342 4 years ago

“So uh where do I put my 84th finger?”
@anotherday-anotherslay 3 months ago

the pokemon theme is ASTOUNDINGLY clear, and i'm sure it's because i always hear it in the background when my brother watches TV. i don't even know all the lyrics, but i could hear every single word, that's so wild!
@margaretthemagnificent 4 months ago

“All Star” is legit nightmare fuel.
@user-slayer 3 years ago

My brain when I can’t remember the full lyrics:
@-_-3315 4 years ago

it sounds like you trapped someone inside a piano and this is a call for help
@greenlizard4208 5 months ago

it sounds like it's coming out of a radio that barely survived a zombie apocalypse, but i can still hear it, that's pretty cool man!
@BowlOSoup6661 3 months ago

I love how you can literally hear the inflection. Not just the lyrics