A Research on Auditory Illusions
Sound Fusion in Confusion
Sound Fusion in Confusion
This project is supported by Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab
C-LAB CREATORS Creation/Research Support Program 2021
This project explores auditory illusion and its application in musical composition. While there are many examples of optical illusions, auditory illusion evades notice. Additionally, music theory generally promulgates rules for composers from the perspective of mathematics but rarely provides any clue about auditory perception and its limitations. This project composes intriguing musical pieces with illusory auditory perceptions by disassembling and assembling sounds and melodies to observe the effects of using auditory illusion in composing music. Beyond the research and composing, it reflects on why humans experience auditory illusion and asks whether human auditory perception is as sensitive as we believe. If today’s technology requires increasingly high definition and quality of sound, can our perception catch up with the speed of this evolution? This project also considers the relationship between art and technology. Does the imagination inspired by art accelerate the development of technology, or does the evolution of technology provide more diverse expressions for art?
Yi-Hsin HUA
Hua Yi-Hsin worked as a research & development engineer specializing in digital signal processing for an audio brand and has been engaged in acoustics and audio signal processing for ten years. She earned a master’s degree in music informatics from the University of Music Karlsruhe in Germany and another in power mechanical engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Her research interests embrace audio signal processing and algorithm development, 3-D sound field synthesis, heavy metal music, and electronic/experimental music. Psychoacoustics and auditory perception are her recent research focus.
