AUDITORY PAREIDOLIA

   Also known as Rorschach audio and auditory peripheric hallucination. The term auditory pareidolia is indebted to the Greek words para (next to, in addition, beside) and eidos (image, appearance, looks). The eponym Rorschach audio refers to the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), the inventor of the Rorschach inkblot test. Both terms are used to denote a * cognitive illusion consisting of intelligible and meaningful words discerned in a pattern of unintelligible words, random sounds, or white noise. Auditory pareidolia is classified as atypeof *pareidolia. The notion of pareidolia, at least as originally conceptualized by the Russian psychiatrist Victor Kandinsky (1849-1889), used to have an exclusive bearing on the visual modality. Today pareidolia tends to be attributed to * apophenia, i.e. an excess of perceptual or heuristic sensitivity leading to the discernment of patterns or connections in random or otherwise meaningless data. As a consequence, the term now encompasses cognitive illusions experienced in any of the sensory modalities. Auditory parei-dolia is believed to play an important part in * backward masking, as well as in the * electronic voice phenomenon (EVP).

   References

   Kandinsky, V. (1885). Kritische und klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der Sinnestäuschungen. Erste und zweite Studie. Berlin: Friedländer und Sohn.

   Banks, J. (2001). Rorschach audio: Ghost voices and perceptual creativity. Leonardo Music Journal, 11, 77-83.

   Blom, J.D., Sommer, I.E.C. (2009). Auditory hallucinations. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology (in press).