[HN Gopher] Bouba/kiki effect
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Bouba/kiki effect
Author : cscurmudgeon
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-06-16 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| Retr0id wrote:
| HN is kiki
| jesprenj wrote:
| Mastodon is bouba?
|
| "?" is bouba "!" is kiki
| tigerlily wrote:
| Bouba is you
| re wrote:
| Not sure if this is a reference to the game "Baba Is You",
| recently discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689759
|
| But that post did make me think of this effect, especially as
| another character in the game is named "Keke"
| bhaney wrote:
| Reference goes the other way. The character names in _Baba is
| You_ are explicitly references to this effect
| thih9 wrote:
| Previous discussion from 2021:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Bouba /Kiki Effect_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94
| comments)
|
| _Bouba /kiki effect_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1
| comment)
|
| (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are
| just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer
| overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi
| periodical
| viraptor wrote:
| Fourier transform is a "bouba -> kikki" transform.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape
| of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also
| empirically testable
|
| (not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to
| me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains
| interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have
| an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do,
| that's why looking at nature, smooth curves and such, is
| empirically more relaxing for people than artificial
| environments..?)
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a
| sense of waveforms. It's called "sound". Tonality and sound
| differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for
| recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :)
|
| But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia?
|
| Indeed an interesting question how that is related.
|
| I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with
| sound
| rcxdude wrote:
| I think the surprising thing would be if the logic goes
| high frequency -> spiky waveform -> spiky shape, because
| that would imply that that particular representation of the
| sound is being used as part of the intuition. Which would
| be unusual, as it's not generally how people experience
| sound (for sure the opposite doesn't really occur: even
| someone very used to looking at waveforms will struggled to
| actually understand a sound by looking at the waveform to
| anywhere near the detail of listening to it). Even with
| synesthesia it tends to be associated with
| colors/feelings/smells etc in a way that doesn't tend to
| match with technical representation of sound.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Well how would you imagine a spiky sound from say, a
| synthesizer?
|
| Guess it would have lots of overtones / not a smooth
| signal curve (Fourier duality)
| amelius wrote:
| I wonder what the outcome would be if they said "bouba" in a
| high-pitched voice, and "kiki" in a low-pitched voice.
| amatic wrote:
| I think it's just that bouba has o, and kiki has k. Also the b
| is half-round, and I is more spiky. Visual differences, not
| auditory. edit: You make a round shape with your mouth in o
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| The article says it also works in some languages without a
| writing system.
| jesprenj wrote:
| What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't
| theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs
| bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on),
| (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological
| order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it
| sound weird?
|
| Does this effect have a name?
| viraptor wrote:
| Yes, there's a Vsauce short about that, but given the amount of
| them there's no way I'll find it...
|
| Edit, found it another way: "Irreversible binomial"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| Reading examples of unwritten rules in the English language
| always feels kind of unsettling to me. Like the order
| adjectives are supposed to appear in.
| foreigner wrote:
| I've noticed that comparing languages - e.g. in Hebrew they say
| "less or more" instead of the English "more or less".
| stavros wrote:
| Same in Greek, now that you mention it.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Yes. As per etymologynerd, English speakers tend to like
| trochaic stress rhythm in sentences, like "salt and pepper" or
| "lee and sophie" where a different ordering sounds weird.
| tantalor wrote:
| Those are idioms.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Even among words that _do_ theoretically have an ordering
| preference, some people have different habits. I knew someone
| who habitually said "three or two", rather than "two or
| three".
|
| Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another
| comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the
| brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing
| "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a
| phrase whose meaning you understand directly without
| decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment
| of having to map the components to the composite meaning,
| together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference
| to have a meaning.
|
| (In mathematics, there's a reason to have both +- and [?],
| since you can use them both in the same equation when you need
| "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one
| is minus". For instance, a+-b[?]c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
|
| I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to
| know it.
| adzm wrote:
| You might be interested in reading up on branching and related
| concepts
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(linguistics)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had
| many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual
| pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native
| speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble
| that clause in the same order as each other without really
| being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed
| grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people just
| explain it as basically due to vibes. It was definitely not
| anything I remember from my public school education growing up.
|
| If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block -
| that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any
| pair of those around it just _feels weird_ and the farther
| apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap
| would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has
| awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear
| aloud.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Big shiny square metal block doesn't look so bad to me, but
| big shiny heavy square metal block does. Perhaps big it is
| the switch back and forth... big and heavy are fuzzily size-
| like characteristics while shiny is not...
|
| Is a big shiny square metal block the same thing as a big
| square shiny metal block? I'm not sure. I think the former is
| a big square metal block which happens to also be shiny,
| while the latter is a big square block made of a shiny type
| of metal.
|
| Does that make any sense at all?
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Fifteen years ago I went to a museum exhibit on Reggio Emilia
| teaching methods that I still think about once a week or so.
| (Reggio Emilia is similar to Montessori in that it is child-led
| exploration but different in that encourages multiple cross-modal
| forms of expression to aid comprehension.)
|
| The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-
| modal exercise of _drawing_ the sounds of various types of shoes
| walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of
| Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory
| experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with
| spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones.
| This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller
| nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to
| magnitude.
|
| I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition:
| children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that
| often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to
| "draw this sound" or "build something that feels like this smell"
| is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely
| game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment
| literally does not compute.
|
| This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a
| remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of
| expression to understand and interpret the world--an ability I
| had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my
| communication with young children in early education
| environments.
|
| It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal
| communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr.
| Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children's
| parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new
| vocabulary with not just children but adults. It's been a
| powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
| userbinator wrote:
| "Bouba" sounds like a slang term for a certain part of the human
| anatomy which is also rounded and curvy.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| I have always thought this association is partly from some
| intuition we have about the mechanical and acoustic properties of
| hypothetical things that would have this shape.
|
| The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it
| were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc.
| The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made
| of something softer and possibly elastic.
|
| It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape
| will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and
| lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling
| - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer
| transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the
| shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water
| landing).
| why_at wrote:
| I always thought Bouba/Kiki would make cool "matching" tattoos.
|
| Strangely, everyone I've asked says they would want to be Bouba.
| No one wants to be Kiki.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Seems very self-evident/obvious. In real life, soft, round things
| make soft, muted sounds. Sharp things make higher pitched,
| shorter sounds. The sounds of bouba and kiki reflects this.
| meowface wrote:
| Plus the letters in "bouba" appear rounder than the letters in
| "kiki".
| otho wrote:
| Someone made a script (for English) based on this concept:
| https://pcho.net/takeluma/
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