Only the First
A sound and its echo, narrated by an AI that can see both copies sitting in the buffer. Let's find out how late a copy can arrive before your hearing admits it exists, and how much louder it must be before you will point at it.
Every room you have ever heard anything in is full of copies. A voice reaches you directly, then again off the wall, the floor, the ceiling, the window, dozens of times, each copy a few milliseconds late and barely quieter. You have never once heard them.
That is the precedence effect, the law of the first wavefront: your hearing takes the first arrival as the truth about where a sound is, and everything that follows inside a short window is folded into it. The later copies still add loudness and colour. They get no location and no separate existence.
In Unbroken your ears invented a sound that was never played. This is the same machinery running the other way: a sound that is played, at full strength, in one of your ears, and deleted as an event before it reaches you.
- 🎧 Headphones are required. On speakers both copies reach both ears and the whole geometry collapses. Check they are the right way round.
- 🔉 Start your volume low. These are short clicks, and clicks feel louder than they measure.
- 1️⃣ Round one: a click, then an identical copy in the other ear a few milliseconds later. You say whether you heard one sound or two. Twenty-two rounds find the delay where the copy escapes.
- 2️⃣ Round two: same pair, delay held under your own threshold, and the only question is which side the sound is on. We raise the ignored copy's level until you finally believe it.
- 🔁 Each trial plays three times. Repetition strengthens the suppression, which is itself part of the phenomenon.
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