This morning, multitasking in my kitchen, I shut off the running water in the sink and then turned to switch off the blender behind me. But then a funny thing happened.
While I was looking at the blender, I realized I could still hear the water running in the sink. Figuring I had not managed to shut it off all the way, I turned back toward the sink.
But the moment I looked at the sink, two things happened simultaneously: (1) I saw that the water was no longer running, and (2) the sound of running water suddenly vanished. All I could now hear was the sound of the still-running blender.
Apparently the loud whirring of the blender had created a kind of sonic illusion. Somehow my ears had been tricked by the presence of that louder noise into continuing to “hear” the sound of water running.
Now I am wondering whether we can use such sonic illusions when designing immersive virtual realities. Rather than creating a literal sound for every activity in a simulated environment, we might be able to use sleight of hand to merely suggest the presence of some activities, and then use sonic masking (the equivalent of that running blender) to help sell the illusion.
Sounds like an interesting research project waiting to happen…
At the last AES convention in NYC last fall, Michael Abrash from Oculus gave the keynote on how audio will be crucial to VR, and he touched on exactly this area — where are the easy wins where we can sell the illusion without doing the match of physically modeling every interaction in the virtual space that should result in an audio event?
Sonic paraedolia?
Don’t know if this helps, but in drawing it is better to suggest than to make it explicit. Mind seems to have a good time while filling out the holes 🙂