Interactive listening session – the phantom word illusion – a psychoacoustic effect

I will present the phantom word illusion - a psychoacoustic phenomena and auditory illusion originally discovered by Diana Deutsch. In the illusion the listener may hear words that are not necessarily acoustically there. Instead the words that one hears may be linked to the subconscious mind of the listener and stem from ones cultural and linguistic background in the moment of listening. Being a psychoacoustic phenomena, movement is also altering the listening experience drastically. We will conduct a simple listening session where we will listen to different phantom word stimuli and share with each other what we hear in them and perhaps also why we hear what we hear. I have worked intensely with the material in my research at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and through my artistic work, including this years presentation at the Ferienkurse and Kunsthalle Darmstadt.