Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Recognizing music

Interesting effect I noticed driving to work today. I've noticed it before, but it finally piqued me into writing about it. When noise interferes with music, so I can't hear all the notes or words, the song turns completely alien. The first beat of a measure doesn't even happen at the correct place in the melody. It's sometimes not even immediately recognizable as music or singing. It won't be until I finally place the song and remember the correct melody and lyrics that it'll snap back into synch and turn into a song again. It makes me wonder how much I really hear music, and how much is is just playback from memory with the audible song only providing markers to sync to.

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