Fun with synchresis

Bored?

Would you like to have some fun with audio/visual relationships?

I can tell you how!

For those of you who have never tried this, it is super duper fun and you should probably do it soon. All you need is a cartoon with a lot of speaking, (like family guy, south park, SpongeBob, aquateen, etc) and some rap music, with a lot of rapping. All you need to do now is mute the sound on the cartoon you are watching and put on the rap music. You will be amazed at how easily your mind is tricked! The cartoon characters will suddenly seems to be the ones saying the lyrics. It’s fantastic!

If a characters mouth is moving in any way, shape, or form that mimics actual speaking while audio of a voice is played, our minds will automatically associate the sound of the voice with the moving mouth. I should also mention that it helps if the source of the music is very close to the source of the visuals. Like a stereo on top of your television.

This trick works best with rap music because a large amount of vocals allows for much more frequent and believable synchresis.

If you set the default language on your cable box to Spanish, every once and a while SpongeBob will get really weird, maybe, it happened to me last night. I suppose the speaking audio was supposed to be dubbed into Spanish, but it was not and the English audio was still missing. Every time a character spoke, its mouth moved, but no sound came out. However, the sound effects were all still intact. For a long time I was very confused, I thought that maybe it was just a very stylistic episode in which all of the characters were mutes, or mimes or something. But that would be really weird and unlikely so I became somewhat distressed. Luckily I figured out the problem and tonight I realized that this scenario would be perfect for the rap/cartoon trick. You wouldn’t have to lose the sound of the characters actions, but the rap vocals would still seem to come from their mouths!