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MINDS: Audio Illusions... and Delusions When the background music at your favorite restaurant switches from Britney to Bach, hide your wallet! Researchers are connecting musical associations and spending habits – and other ways that people "sometimes behave so strangely."
Music psychologists at central England's University of Leicester recently conducted a test at a local restaurant: how does the background music style (or lack of music) affect customers' spending? Silence was the least golden, with customers spending an average of $35 a head. Pop music yielded a slight increase, to $36.75 a head. The highest spending came when classical music was played – more than $40 a head. Researcher Adrian North has shown that hearing a piece of music "activates all types of knowledge." In this case, he believes classical music has "connotations of sophistication, affluence and wealth" that lead to the increased spending. North's previous studies have shown that French music in a wine store steers customers toward French wines, German music causing them to go German. Another of his studies showed that music slows the passage of time: for telephone customers "on hold," Beatles songs kept them hanging on a full minute longer than those given pre-recorded verbal requests to keep holding. Read the full study at the Univ. of Leicester site Read the AP Story about music and spending habits, or a more extensive report from ABC News Visit Univ. of Leicester's Music Psychology Research Group [Read North's restaurant play lists at the bottom of this page.]
Halfway around the world at the Univ. of California – San Diego, psychology professor Diana Deutsch has been exploring auditory illusions. She was profiled in the Nov. 7, 2003 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In one illusion, a tape loop of the words "sometimes behave so strangely" are transformed by the listener into a distinctly musical passage, after only a few repetitions. Deutsch, who has researched the links between hearing, music and language acquisition, speculates, "It makes sense to me think that originally [all] speech was pitched as tones," much as Chinese, Vietnamese and other languages still are. Other illusions – such as the octave illusion and the tritone illusion – emerge when subjects in her audio laboratory listen to particular sequences of musical tones that the brain cannot reliably resolve. In the phantom words illusion, subjects listen to scrambled fragments of words and syllables, and most everyone seems to pick out words from the chaos. Interestingly, subjects follow patterns in what "words" they "find" in the mess – for example, people tend to find words in their original language, even if they currently use English as their primary language. Dieters "hear" references to pie and Diet Coke. And so forth. In this "auditory Rorschach test," as with many brain functions, "we pick and choose how to bundle things together, rather than admit chaos." Visit Deutsch's web site, and listen to some auditory illusions online Browse Deutsch's two CDs: Phantom Words & Other Curiosities; Musical Illusions & Paradoxes Visit the Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required to archives]
Adrian North's experimental play lists: Pop CD1
Pop CD2
Classical CD1
Classical CD2
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