I find that most of the time I hear a song for the first time, I can’t get all of the lyrics no matter how hard I listen. That said, as soon as I read the lyrics on a lyric website, I can go back to the song and hear the words no problem. Why is that?
In: Biology
Human hearing really isn’t as good as we’d like to think. Our brains just fill in the gap. This is easier to do when the information has an expected value.
[deleted]
How I learned the lyrics to The Immigrant Song
Hey he human mind is a pattern recognition algorithm, we when under stand the pattern it’s easier to notice. Otherwise if it’s even a little off, we need more info to figure it out.
It’s why 99% of the time you can’t do something on the first try of which you have zero knowledge…
Your brain kinda partially knows what to expect, so it has the information it needs to decipher the often-garbled lyrics. Like, the lyric might sound like henkwing or something; a meaningless word, but then you look at the lyrics and it’s actually penguin, so the next time you hear it you still hear henkwing but your brain goes henkwing = penguin.
Human pattern recognition works both bottom-up and top-down.
Bottom-up is when you look at all the details, and piece together the big picture from them. An example of this is when you read an unfamiliar word, and sound it out letter by letter.
Top-down is when you notice the big picture, and figure out what details would fit it. An example is when you read a word that’s msiseplled, but can still understand it.
It’s hard to distinguish speech sounds when there’s background noise like music. It’s very easy for an f to sound like a v or a th. That makes bottom-up processing more difficult. When you read the lyrics, that tells you what you should listen for, and lets your top-down processing fill in the blanks.
It’s because of a phenomena called ‘priming’. The simplest explanation is that muffled or garbled audio is easier to decipher, if you are already expecting specific words to be heard.
I’ve always thought there was something wrong with me, because I can never completely understand song lyrics. I think it’s to do with the way words or sentences are broken up to flow with the beat. I’ll listen to a song and hear “sounds”, but then read the lyrics and it finally clicks into something I understand.
Why is it easier to find your destination when you use a map instead of just guessing? 🤦
Latest Answers