About Tricks of Ear and Eye

Tricks of Ear and Eye is a perception science site for curious readers. Each entry hands you something to examine with your own senses, such as a stimulus drawing, a short synthesized sound or a table of sensory data, and then sets it beside what experiments with people and animals found.

The tagline is How reality gets edited on the way in. Figures and numbers can be recomputed on your own computer; statements about what people perceive name the study and the people it tested.

The site is written for anyone pulled in by an odd picture, a strange sound or a question about what an animal can sense. It is also written for science and music teachers who want a figure or a sound for class, for music students curious about how instruments work, and for designers interested in where pigments came from.

What the site covers

Entries sit in five categories.

Sound explains named acoustic and psychoacoustic effects, such as the Doppler effect and the Shepard tone, each with a short synthesized demonstration sound.

Instruments takes apart how instruments make sound, from the piano hammer to the clarinet: mechanisms, materials and physics, with no verdicts on tone.

Illusions covers named static illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer figure and the Kanizsa triangle, with stimulus drawings and the competing explanations side by side.

Color & Pigment follows the chemistry and history of pigments such as ultramarine and Prussian blue, along with how color vision works.

Animal Senses looks at how animal receptors work, from mantis shrimp eyes to bat echolocation, and traces popular claims back to the original studies.

Who the site is not for

The ear and the eye in the name are about sounds and sights, not health. The site does not cover hearing or eye health and offers no diagnosis, treatment or hearing-protection advice. Questions about your own hearing or sight belong with a qualified clinician.

The site does not review or recommend instruments or audio equipment, and it does not rate how anything sounds.

It is not a literature review: an entry cites the studies needed to examine one effect, not every paper on it.

Where the site stands

The site's view is that senses are translators, not cameras: each entry sets the original (the stimulus) beside the translation (the percept that experiments measured). That is a stance, not a scientific finding, and it covers only the effects written about here, not the nature of consciousness. In plain terms, the same physical input can be judged differently in different contexts, so each page reports the input and the experimental results separately.

Several positions follow from that view.

Senses are counted by receptor. The school list of five leaves out balance, the sense of where your limbs are and the sense of temperature.

A measured response is not an experience. When a study records which option a trained animal chooses, the entry reports the choice and stops short of describing how the stimulus appears to that animal.

A missing primary source is a result. When an origin story for a pigment cannot be traced to a first-hand record, the entry says so instead of repeating the story.

Competing explanations stay side by side. Where researchers disagree about why an illusion works, each account appears with its evidence, and none is called settled early.

A difference in a spectrum is not the same as a difference you can hear. Claims that people can hear or see a difference cite experiments with human listeners or viewers and state the test conditions.

How the checks work

Every demonstration sound is synthesized from a published parameter file, and its spectrum is recomputed to confirm that the fundamental, the overtones and any modulation came out as set.

Every stimulus figure is drawn from stated coordinates, and the saved file is measured again to confirm its geometry: equal line lengths, equal color values or a stated angle.

Research claims are traced to the original paper, which is then checked for later corrections, retractions and replication studies. When studies of similar weight disagree, both results are given.

Data tables come with a CSV file you can download and recompute. The numbers in the text, the percept card and the CSV come from that one file.

Each photograph and painting reproduction is checked one file at a time for its license, and its caption carries the full credit.

Source lists state how much of each source was read. When only an abstract could be read, the entry says so and does not rely on details the abstract leaves out.

These checks have a limit. A computation can show that a stimulus was built to its parameters. It cannot show that you, or anyone, will see or hear a particular effect, so statements about what people perceive cite studies with human participants, and effects can differ between people, screens and speakers.

Safety

Each entry ends with a Sense check, one action meant to be safe and to take under 60 seconds. Turn your volume down before playing any sound on the site. No page asks you to breathe in a gas, handle a toxic pigment, look at a bright light, or listen loud or for long.

Reusing and citing

Figures, stimulus drawings, CSV files and synthesized sounds made by this site are released under CC BY 4.0. The exceptions and the exact credit lines are on Stimuli and sounds for reuse. Each entry also ends with a Cite this page block for citing it.

Three terms used here

The sensory exchange rate is a conversion of another species' or another sense's measurement into a human reference, stated with the quantity and unit on both sides.

The correction scar is a metaphor for a systematic error that a usually helpful kind of processing produces with one particular stimulus.

The silent millimeter is a construction dimension too small to judge by eye that measurement shows changing an instrument's output.

The colors of the site

The site's blue is named after ultramarine, the pigment. The amber accent and the blue-black behind the dark theme are named after afterimages and dark adaptation. These are names for design colors, not claims about what an afterimage or night vision looks like.

Reporting an error

If you find a mistake, write to contact@tricksofearandeye.com. Name the page, quote the statement and add a source if you have one. Corrections are published at the foot of the affected entry and on Errors and fixes, with the date and what changed. More on what to send is on Questions and corrections.