Event Detail

Thu Dec 5, 2019
Howison Library
4–6 PM
Graduate Research Colloquium
Alex Kerr (UC Berkeley)
Feeling a beat

Listen to music, and you can feel a beat, or repeating pulse, under the sounds. But you can feel a beat differently while hearing the sounds as otherwise alike. Heard each way, things sound different. But, heard each way, there is no difference in what seems to happen around you. So why do things sound different? The answer, I argue, is not that you are aware of different objective features of sounds or subjective features of your experience. Instead, things sound different because you perceive the timing of sounds in different ways. I will try to clarify what these “ways” of perceiving are, and draw some morals for theories of perception.