Cellphone rings on TV, I momentarily think it's my phone - what causes it?

April 7, 2004 9:18 AM

Whenever a cellphone rings on a TV Show, I momentarily think it's my cellphone ringing -- or, if it doesn't sound like mine, some other phone in the same room as me. I don't just think this because the sound sounds like a phone; I think it because it sounds like the ringing is coming from outside the TV -- from closer to me than the other sounds coming from the TV set. Has anyone else experienced this? What causes this auditory illusion?
posted by grumblebee to Grab Bag (15 answers total)

I experience it, but I don't know what causes it. There's an episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine's PDA (I think) beeps, and I hear it somewhere in my living room. Same thing happens with cell phones, more often than with land-line phones, on TV--it must be the frequency of the tone. Freaks me out every damned time.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:32 AM on April 7, 2004

I've always thought it isn't so much the physical tones or frequency, but just that from day one we pretty much are 'trained' that 'phone-sound-means-we-get-the-phone'
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 9:41 AM on April 7, 2004

Response by poster: Mr. Moon and John, your two posts perfectly express the debate in my head. Is it a frequency issue or is it just mental traning (or both)?

It's kind of like auditory 3D. Maybe it could be used for some kind of cool sound effect.
posted by grumblebee at 9:47 AM on April 7, 2004

I've recently finished watching the first season of Six Feet Under and was constantly annoyed that Peter Krause's character (Nate) had the exact same cell-phone ring as I do. Every time it would go off I'd kind of jump up and begin looking for my phone. How Pavlovian.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:48 AM on April 7, 2004

Conjecture: I'm inclined to think it's a frequency thing, and here's why: When I listen to certain songs in my car (usually dance/club type songs) that have an electronic harmony line buried in them, I often think my cell phone is going off in my purse. None of the songs sound anything like my cell phone ringers.

Of course, I can also walk into a house where the TV or radio is on but muted in another room, and immediately tell that "something's on"... so maybe I'm just a freak.
posted by ArsncHeart at 10:04 AM on April 7, 2004

ArsncHeart, I do that, too. I know it's a high-frequency sound I'm (mostly subconsciously) hearing, but it manifests more as a "feeling."
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:59 AM on April 7, 2004

Just a wild guess: Could it be that because these gizmos have cheezy little speakers, the sounds they produce can be reproduced "perfectly" by a television, whereas other sounds from the show are not as true to life?

Or, could it be that these bleeps are for the most part foley effects?

OR miss, we've traced the cellphone ring, it's coming from inside the house!
posted by Capn at 11:03 AM on April 7, 2004

I had a boss once who told me that in college, he studied psychoacoustics, and particularly the phenomenon where monophonic sounds are extremely difficult to localize.

The newest cellphones have polyphonic rings, so this should be less and less of an issue, but I've noticed with widgets that beep in general (and these widgets generally have cheap speakers and simple sound chips, so yes, they're monophonic), it's hard to locate them based on their sound--not just on TV, when they're physically present. I had a "musical" calculator when I was a teenager that was especially uncanny in this regard.

I'm afraid I can't point to anything that will back this up, so take it for whatever it's worth.
posted by adamrice at 12:06 PM on April 7, 2004

That happens to me all the time. Not sure what causes it, but I always assumed that the sound was bouncing around the room and one channel wound up slightly time delayed. This confuses your brain, giving the illusion of the sound source being in a different location than it actually is. This is one of many techniques that is used to simulate a 3D audio environment.

For what it's worth, I've noticed this effect is especially pronounced on our Wega, in stereo mode with "steady sound" turned on.

I remember being really shocked the first time I heard a cell phone ringing on TV. The old analog rings are extremely difficult to reproduce, but since cell phones are digital, (like the Capn tells us) TVs have no problem with them.
posted by grateful at 12:14 PM on April 7, 2004

My former roommate, who did research in the area, gave me a partial explanation once. People involved in acoustic modeling like to talk about something called the "head-related transfer function," which describes how the shape of the head and ears alter audio signals before they reach the two eardrums. Signals are altered in different ways depending upon the orientation of the source with respect to the head, and of course the alteration is different in one ear relative to the other. The brain can make use of this differential to obtain directional information about the signal.

The problem: in general, the higher frequencies (and especially monophonic signals, as adamrice points out) are not altered very heavily by the head-related transfer function. The brain ends up with too little information to work with, and makes an educated guess that may be wrong.
posted by Galvatron at 1:07 PM on April 7, 2004

adamrice and Galvatron are right on the money, if I remember my acoustics correctly. And even just going anecdotally, it seems right.

Ever try locating the source of a highpitched pure sine wave? It's like it's nowhere and everywhere at once.
posted by cortex at 4:02 PM on April 7, 2004

Cell phone rings tend to fall in the frequency range that humans, for one reason or another, have a hard time pinpointing the direction of. The same thing is true of ambulance sirens, which unfortunately means that it is hard to tell where a siren is coming from.

The solution in the case of the sirens is to have the usual, familiar siren along with a static, white-noise type sound which is much easier to pinpoint.

This 'hard to pinpoint' frequency range is largely the same as a human voice. Evolutionarily I think it might be that humans needed to know the direction of a twig snapping behind them, but were not so dependent on direction when having to interpret speech.

If this feature of human hearing was more widely understood it would make for far less annoyance and confusion, to be sure.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:32 PM on April 7, 2004

I just set my cell phone ring to a football fight song, so no one else has that ring, as far as I know.
posted by oaf at 6:43 AM on April 8, 2004

This difficulty in locating certain frequencies is presumably exploited by this strange device too.
posted by Gamecat at 7:09 AM on April 8, 2004

I like adamrice's answer. My cordless phone has a pager function, to help me find the handset when it's been misplaced under a couch cushion. But even then, I often can't find it, due to the sound's being hard to locate. Might explain wny crickets are so hard to find, too.
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posted by MrMoonPie at 9:16 AM on April 20, 2004