Good gravy, if it isn't one thing it is another thing. If you keep up with Penny Arcade like I do, they have recently done a comic in retaliation to this
http://www.boycottwatch.org/misc/mattel.htm
Apparently Mattle released a baby doll that is supposed to wiggle around and speak. Now people are claiming that the words "Islam is the Light" are coming out of the sound chip embedded in the baby doll. You can hear sound files both slowed down and at a normal speed at the website above.
This is silly nonsense, again by people who have way too much time on their hands. I have listened to both sound files and while I could have associated the useless baby babble for "Islam is the Light", I didn't, because I knew better.
Its just another case of distortion by sound matrixing, a phenomena in which your brain recognizes words in what would otherwise be nonsense. And when you get thousands of people who are looking and expecting to hear "Islam is the Light", what do you think they are going to hear? They are going to hear exactly what they want.
Lets face facts people, Mattle has been around since I was a kid, and I will assume it has been around longer then that, so it is easily a tried and true trusted company that has weathered the ages. And have, in the past, pulled product when they thought it prudent. In this age of paranoia, war and terrorism, do you think that Mattle would ever, ever leave something like this on the shelves if it said what a handful of people are claiming it said?
In the end, it all boils down to over protective parents, who are not smart enough, to have enough common sense, to think for themselves.
ID:278057
 Feb 3 2009, 3:19 am
|
|
 That made me actually lol. | |
I did hear it, but only because it was pointed out to me. After listening to it a few times, I decided it sounded more like "iham i ight," where the first two i's are pronounced like long e's
| |
Sound more like "reguarding dwight". I have no idea why a baby would say this however...
| |
I apon a second listen, The baby is clearly saying "Igniom or fright" I'm not sure what this means, but it can't be good. when asked for comment, the doll replied "mom is not bright." At whitch point a little girl started crying....
| |
I'm positive that it says "Islamic Delight", and I'd bet that a statistically significant portion of people who listen to the clip and are asked whether it is babble or a message would respond that there is a message there.
| |
PirateHead wrote:
I'm positive that it says "Islamic Delight", and I'd bet that a statistically significant portion of people who listen to the clip and are asked whether it is babble or a message would respond that there is a message there. The phrase "Islamic delight" is even more of a stretch to hear than "Islam is the light". But even if a statistically significant percentage of people hears a message there, it proves nothing; the percentage of people incapable of distinguishing subtle language sounds has got to be alarmingly high, or the English language wouldn't be split into so many tortured dialects around the world. Couple an inability to say "That's not distinct enough to be an N or an L" with an innate desire to pull patterns out of chaos, and you'll get a lot of people saying they hear words. It doesn't make them right though. I suspect phoneme deafness is way more common than most other processing problems, though it definitely must vary by degrees. Our ability to hear and distinguish sounds is something we learn very young and even natural aptitude can be dulled by a poor learning environment. Many other forms of recognition failure, like face blindness, seem to follow more of a 2% rule--they occur in 2% of the population. But how many people are tone-deaf? 2% or way more? At a rough estimate, I suspect around 2% are completely tone-deaf and a much larger percentage, maybe as high as 40%-50%, is not so good at telling two notes apart or telling if a note is on pitch. A lot of people can sing better in a group for just this reason; they can follow others but on their own they lose the note. Anyway the simple fact of it is there is no message there. That you heard one that's actually more complex than the one purported means you're probably in a below-average category in ability to pick up on language sounds. (No offense meant, naturally; such things are just part of who we are.) You're positive you heard a message and not babble because you aren't able to hear the babble, which unfortunately also means you're not going to be inclined to agree with anyone who can. If two dogs (pardon the analogy) were talking and one said he saw a rainbow, the other would have no idea what he was talking about. So people who are hearing a message in this noise are skeptical of those who say they hear none; they assume they have better pattern-recognition skills when in truth their pattern-recognition is merely acting on poorer-quality information. Anyway, Occam's Razor is enough to puncture the whole thing. No major toy company has incentive to promote Islam or pretty much any other religion, particularly Mattel which has been demonized by extremists like the Taliban for selling their Barbie line. If they were to hide a message in a toy, it would likely be one cross-promoting their other brands or giving kids the idea that the toy is more fun than it is, stoking their enthusiasm. I'm pretty sure they'd rather make money than enemies. But even that would be hard to get away with; subliminal advertising simply doesn't work that well, and it angers people if it's found out. Lummox JR | |
While I agree with you on the argument about motives, I think the whole phoneme deafness thing is bogus. If people agree upon the interpretation that some string of sounds represents a message, then they are by definition right. The dialects of English around the world are not tortured; they are influenced by many factors and can vary greatly, but none of them are objectively "wrong", and those who speak one dialect or the other are not "phoneme deaf" as compared to some more precise dialect. Whatever people can agree upon for purposes of communication is correct language. How this relates to the case at hand is that, if a significant portion of people who hear the sounds agree that it is a message, then the message is there whether or not it was intended.
| |
PirateHead wrote:
While I agree with you on the argument about motives, I think the whole phoneme deafness thing is bogus. If people agree upon the interpretation that some string of sounds represents a message, then they are by definition right. Actually no; they are only right if the string of sounds was intended to be a message. A message requires both a sender and a receiver. If they collectively agree they hear a message where none was intended, they are still wrong; they are merely in agreement with each other. Whatever people can agree upon for purposes of communication is correct language. Correct for their purposes, at least, but yes, inasmuch as language is a matter of consensus, you have a point. How this relates to the case at hand is that, if a significant portion of people who hear the sounds agree that it is a message, then the message is there whether or not it was intended. It's still not a message so much as a sound they happen to agree is there. The intent is entirely relevant. As with any good optical illusion, the audio has several possible interpretations, which is completely in keeping with the manufacturer's contention that it was intended to be babble and nothing more. In an optical illusion the goal is ambiguity, and Mattel achieved that with audio here. There is in raw fact no clear "l" sound in there; the only sound that's really clear at all is the "t" at the end. In phonetics a sound is either there or it isn't, and in pure fact--not opinion, fact--the sounds can't be differentiated into proper phonemes. That could mean several things, like that the speaker did not enunciate clearly or the audio was garbled, in which case an attempt to fill in the blanks would be warranted. But it's obvious that clear enunciation was never intended. It's a bunch of sounds that are meant to sound like half-formed attempts at words. What's surprising is that people are grasping at so many straws to finish forming the words that were never there. Lummox JR | |
PirateHead wrote:
While I agree with you on the argument about motives, I think the whole phoneme deafness thing is bogus. Haha, wrong. Did you know the sounds that the "l" sounds in the word "lulls" are different sounds? Did you know that the "th" in "this" and "thing" are different sounds? Did you know that if you blow air through your lips instead of stopping when you're making a "p" or "b" sound, English-speakers will interpret it as an "f" or "v" sound? The reason is that English doesn't differentiate between any of these phonemes, so the mind readjusts them to the things that fit closest. That, combined with the effect called paraeidolia, are the reasons you're haring those, and likely not because it was purposely put in. | |
Popisfizzy wrote:
PirateHead wrote: You're misusing both the concept of the phoneme and of paraeidolia. If people agree upon the meaning of a set of phonemes, then they can be said to have that meaning, which is unlike inkblots and random garbled phonemes which people may extract meaning from but will disagree significantly as to what the meaning is. All the stuff about "th" in "this" vs "thing" says nothing about phoneme deafness - it has to do with phonetics, the pronunciation and spelling of written words. The "th" in "this" and in "thing" are two different phonemes, and someone who substitutes one for the other in those two example words will sound distinctly different. That is often evident in music, where phonemes are substituted in order to dictate style or enhance rhyme, and people who know the song well will use phonemes in places they never normally would when they sing those songs. Take Smashing Pumpkin's "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" for example: very few people draw their Rs out in normal speech. You wouldn't say "Look, a rrrrat!" unless you had a stutter or speech impediment of sorts. However, anyone who knows the song well and sings it will sing "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rrrradina cage." The abnormal phoneme use is evidence that people are aware of differences in the phonemes used by poets and those used in normal speech. | |
PirateHead wrote:
You're misusing both the concept of the phoneme and of paraeidolia. Erm, no. I believe the entire point of my post went directly over your head. I'm saying that, if the set of sounds uses phonemes that are allophonic to those in "Islam is the light", the mind will percieve them as saying that. Recognizing a false positive rather than a false negative is far more advantageous, though it would occasionally bring about false signals. This is almost certainly a case of false signals. | |
What you're saying is that a bunch of phones which sound much like "Islam is the light" and are perceived as such do not, by some standard that you have determined, actually form those words -- and I say that's bogus. "Sounds like X" is not something you can disprove, as it's an emergent phenomena and it is entirely composed of impressions by people who hear the phones.
| |
Please, PirateHead, look over my posts. Look carefully. If you've actually read them, instead of doing some inane style of glossing that you seem to be doing, you'll note that I haven't said that it doesn't sound like that, because it does. But the chances are that the individual sounds that comprise the sounds the doll makes are only sounds that our minds are converting into ones we're more used to.
And the fact that they found /t/ at the end is hardly anything surprising. That's one of the most common phonemes, along with /k/, /m/, /n/, and /p/. Few languages lack them. | |
PirateHead wrote:
While I agree with you on the argument about motives, I think the whole phoneme deafness thing is bogus. If people agree upon the interpretation that some string of sounds represents a message, then they are by definition right. The dialects of English around the world are not tortured; they are influenced by many factors and can vary greatly, but none of them are objectively "wrong", and those who speak one dialect or the other are not "phoneme deaf" as compared to some more precise dialect. Whatever people can agree upon for purposes of communication is correct language. How this relates to the case at hand is that, if a significant portion of people who hear the sounds agree that it is a message, then the message is there whether or not it was intended. Many people can also agree that the Christian God is real, but there is simply no way to prove it. What people believe is not always right. Maybe a string of sounds is present, and some people try to make out something from it, but really what they're doing is stretching the issue. There are enough sounds missing for their idea to be bunk--it's obvious the baby doesn't say that. If you want to play the number game, there are still more people that believe that the idiots thinking that Mattel is promoting Islam are just dead wrong. You choose what to believe, you choose your reality. | |
I read over your posts again and I can't see what you're getting at if it's not something to which I've already responded. If you feel like re-explaining anything using different words, I'll be happy to re-evaluate.
However, here's a somewhat-related thought experiment. Suppose that you create a list of all permutations of n or less phonemes, then within those lists sublists using all the phones in the phoneme. One set would be gibberish to a listener, but another set would sound distinctly like language. Does the lack of intentionality in the latter set keep that set from containing messages? I argue that it does not - a person listening to clips from the latter set could correctly identify them as messages. | |
That's the whole thing about language -- it's based entirely on belief. Now, we can make more assumptions about speech and language than we can about the Christian God (we've got computers which can understand speech to some extent, but none that can work miracles in the Biblical sense, or demonstrate any ability to invoke the Divine). Language came about because people agreed upon a way to communicate, and religion came about because people agreed upon a way to live and pray, both within boundaries. The fact that they are belief-based systems mean that they evade classical methods of evaluation, and thus the terminology that comes with them (right/wrong, correct/incorrect: you can't tell a person that their evaluation of a sound as speech is wrong any more than you can tell them that their religious feelings are wrong. It's their perception that matters -- all you can do is disagree, based upon your own perceptions).
| |
Perhaps we have three notions of meaning here: Intended Meaning, Interpreted Meaning and Agreed Meaning. In your example, no meaning was intended but could be interpreted. As such, the speaker and the listener are not in agreement about meaning. As a third party, it would seem that you could only say with any degree of certainty whether there are messages within a set if there is agreed meaning (putting aside the potential for the speaker or listener to lie about intended or interpreted meaning). I personally don't feel too comfortable as a third party calling the notion of meaning if the speaker and the listener can't even agree, but I guess I would probably favour the speaker's notion of meaning, assuming no track record for lying either way. Benefit of the doubt.
| |
I don't see this boycott going anywhere. This is the same kind of stupid nonsense that got people thinking there's a "take off your clothes" line in Aladdin (there isn't). When audio is muted or distorted or even just plain garbage, people either misinterpret what was actually said or mistakenly hear words where nothing specific was said. The human brain is a pattern recognition engine and it can easily be misled into false positives; more so when wielded ineffectually.
Having listened to the audio in question and Mattel's statement, I'm inclined to say the people making a mountain of this anthill are tin-eared. While there is a definite "t" sound and an "i" vowel before it, the word there (if any) could be "night" as easily as "light", and there's no real indication it was meant to be a word at all. The portion of the audio that supposedly says "Islam" is clearly babble sounds and could just as easily say "uugnami"; it takes a real stretch to put an "s" in there and the supposed "l" is probably closest to "n" or "d"; it's some kind of partially-formed alveolar sound, but "l" is very low on the list of possible interpretations thereof. The "l" that was believed to be in "Islam" and "light" could more easily be an "n" in both cases, but both are far more consistent with a soft-pressure alveolar sound such as a baby who has heard those sounds might make.
Usually with these kinds of something-from-nothing recordings, once you're told what to listen for you can really hear it well if there's anything there to hear. Even trying to interpret the audio that way, I can't make the leap from baby babble to "Islam is the light". At most I can hear the cadence of sounds people are mistaking for that, but the consonants don't fit and many of the vowels don't either. Verdict: If any phrase was hidden in the audio, that isn't it. There is no evidence to suggest the audio is anything other than what Mattel says it is.
Not everyone has an ear for language, so those who don't are going to either drop unfamiliar sounds or too-quickly assign an interpretation that may or may not be correct. Obviously that's what happened here. If a person's brain can't pick up on the subtle differences between sounds, an in-between sound that can't be dismissed will sound like one thing or another. It's quite clear that this whole thing is an overreaction on the part of someone with very little ability to discern the differences between subtle language sounds.
Lummox JR