 The Brain / Museum / Illusions / Sensitive Brain / Forever Upwards |
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Click the image above to activate the illusion. We hear musical notes that are constantly rising in pitch, seemingly without end, but that's just an illusion - an auditory illusion. Each note we hear is actually a chord that consists of the same notes in different octaves. The volume of the tones is not uniform: the notes in the higher octaves become weaker, until the highest one disappears completely and is replaced by a note from a stronger lower octave. The never-ending scale of notes is an impossible object named for the famous illusion researcher Roger Shepard, who also devised two other illusions in this exhibit: Size Doesn't Matter and Twin Tables. The illusion consists of a series of musical notes that repeat themselves over and over. Each note is composed of several tones played simultaneously, and the tones in each "chord" are identical (all of them "do" for one note, all "mi," for the next note, and so forth). But these identical notes are played in different octaves and at different volumes. The middle octave of each chord is the loudest, and the lowest and highest octaves are the weakest. The illusion created is that the scale rises upward endlessly (or descends endlessly, depending on how the notes are arranged). Links: Related exhibit:
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Forever Upwards
