Perception of Complex Sonic Objects

There is a common claim of music being the universal language; in my research, I found that we can be very personal or even lonely in our listening experience as if each speaks their own language. To illustrate my point, I invite you to listen to the bell recording from San Francisco. While listening, identify the “pitch” of this bell.

This is the spectrogram of the bell’s sound you just heard and an outline of prominent partials (pitches) that go into creation of this sound.

Compare the pitches of the partials to your choice of the bell’s pitch.

It is possible that you’ve recognized one of those partials as the pitch of your bell. Alternatively, you may have fallen into an acoustic illusion that prompted you to hear a pitch that is not physically present in the recording of the bell. In either case, you can compare your choice to the responses of others.

How other people hear this bell?

The fluctuation of responses shows how personal could be the perceptual experience when we face an unconventional phenomenon.