21–30 of 176 posts
The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi periodical
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also empirically testable (not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at natu…
Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a sense of waveforms. It's called "sound". Tonality and sound differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :) But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia? Indeed an interesting question how that is related. I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound
The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi periodical
I think it's just that bouba has o, and kiki has k. Also the b is half-round, and I is more spiky. Visual differences, not auditory. edit: You make a round shape with your mouth in o
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
HN is kiki
Not sure if this is a reference to the game "Baba Is You", recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689759 But that post did make me think of this effect, especially as another character in the game is named "Keke"
The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc. The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made of something softer and possibly elastic.
It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water landing).
Strangely, everyone I've asked says they would want to be Bouba. No one wants to be Kiki.
Previous discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703
Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a sense of waveforms. It's called "sound". Tonality and sound differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :) But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia? Indeed an interesting question how that is related. I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound
I think the surprising thing would be if the logic goes high frequency -> spiky waveform -> spiky shape, because that would imply that that particular representation of the sound is being used as part of the intuition. Which would be unusual, as it's not generally how people experience sound (for sure the opposite doesn't really occur: even someone very used to looking at waveforms will struggled to actually understa…
Guess it would have lots of overtones / not a smooth signal curve (Fourier duality)