"I got a porcupine called 'Zazoom'
He leaves his scent on people's graves."
-- "Russian Unicorn"
You know the Kuleshov Effect, illustrated by the famous Soviet montage experiment in which an actor's performance seems to change, depending on whatever image (a bowl of soup, a child in a casket, a beautiful woman) appears before identical footage of his face in close-up. Performances in the movies only begin with what the actor does on the set. They are created and re-created every step of the way, from editing to final sound design and mixing (effects, looping, punching, music, etc.). There's also what I would propose we call the "Russian Unicorn Effect," after the amazing music video parody by Bad Lip Reading.
OK, it's already kind of got a name -- the McGurk effect -- and it was "discovered" in 1976 by cognitive psychologist Harry McGurk and his research assistant John MacDonald -- and it explains how sounds can change perceptions of images and vice-versa.
I saw and heard the parody above ("Russian Unicorn") a few months ago, which led me to check out the original Michael Bublé video ("Haven't Met You Yet"), below. I could not believe the difference. Try it yourself -- first the parody, then the original here (embedding disabled, unfortunately).
(Incidentally, Bublé, a Canadian pop singer, says the Bad Lip Reading clip is "One of the coolest things I've ever seen. I was really proud to be a part of it -- even though I had nothing to do with it.")
The BLR version is a semi-raunchy absurdist electro-pop anthem with hip-hop inflections:
Oh, oh, the night is young now baby
We could shoot a Russian unicorn
We'll probably do it on the couch
While my roomie's out hiking
So take if off and bite your tongue
And hope my roommate don't come home
The Bublé tune could have been a hit in the 1970s for Barry Manilow or the Captain and Tenille. The above lyrics roughly correspond to these in the original:
And I know someday that it'll all turn out
You'll make me work so we can work to work it out
And I promise you, kid, that I give so much more than I get
I just haven't met you yet
The anonymous BLR, according to an interview he did with Rolling Stone, is a...
"late-20s-ish" music and video producer from Texas -- "It's a one-man show; it's just me" -- whose introduction to lip reading was personal. BLR's mother, herself a musician, went profoundly deaf in her 40's: "She went from having perfect hearing to having no hearing in just a matter of months, and the doctors never figured out why." BLR marveled at the way his mom, of necessity, became an expert lip reader. He would sometimes sit around at night, watching TV with the sound off trying to pick up the skill himself.
McGurk research has also been used to improve lip-reading, speech-recognition and language-teaching methods (and let's not forget Cee Lo Green's "Forget You"), but I think the most remarkable contrast in these two videos is how wildly different Bublé's performances are -- even though it's really the same performance, lip-synched to different music. I had to go back and forth to figure out when he snarled (or farted) in the "Haven't Met You Yet" video -- or when he went all white boy hand signals. But, really, he didn't. What seems to be a partial smile in the original only becomes a snarl in the BLR version.
We're used to complaining when movie music seems to be too heavily underscoring performances or highlighting emotions. But maybe, when it's done effectively, we don't even notice that the music (or the sound effects or the dialog) are actually creating the performance -- transforming it into something quite different than what the actor did in front of the camera. Just another reminder of how incredibly malleable moving pictures, and our perceptions of them, really are.
P.S. Because I saw the BLR version first, I can't help but hear a line in the original as "And peein' in your life is gonna change me..."
"This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!"
10 Comments
Jim,
Great post. This reminded me of this great video from "The Passing Stones". Enjoy.
http://www.stsanders.com/www/pages/videos/band-shreds/sts-rolling-stones.php
In looking at this and other BLR videos I'm struck at how perfectly the sound seems to match the images on screen; it's a better fit than the original song to me. I've wondered if this is because the sound is so perfectly crafted and produced to follow the images, whereas the original videos were made to suit the song (more or less). BLR's versions seem much tighter to me. I also marvel at how BLR will sometimes add parts of other videos, to the one he's parodying. I haven't made much of an effort to analyze the differences between the originals and BLR's versions, but to my eye these additions from other videos might be to help carry the song along when no one's lips are moving on the screen, or to add other meanings by juxtaposing performers like Miley Cyrus and Snoop Dogg.
I think that the inflections BLR uses so charge the nonsense words used in the songs. The phrase "Black Umbrella" could take on a different cultural meaning the way it 'sounds' coming out of Miley Cyrus' mouth in BLR's video. It sounds unspeakably naughty and likely felonious to me.
All of BLR's work seems so wonderfully Dadistic.
Vince Frost
Fantastic! I hadn't seen this at all so thanks for that. I also love that it's one guy using his ingenuity and personal history to create something new and surreal!
Also Buble performing on SNL with a full band behind him immediately transports you back to 1973. The other crazy thing about it is that he smiles when he sings. You know like he's actually entertaining you and enjoying it. Why did that ever go away?
That's similar to the effect of people hearing lyrics in music played backward. Michael Shermer explains it in his TEDtalk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T_jwq9ph8k
That was transcendent! You blew my mind!
Jim, this stuff isn't anywhere near as good as music was back in my day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7r6XXI_oX0
Anyway, both are so artificially processed I'm not sure which is a parody of the other. The "original," a mini soap-opera tune for pubescent prole girls, is about 40% human voice and 60% that whatchamacallit thing -- vocorder? -- that they've been playing to death since Cher made a hit using it.
The effect you're describing might be better illustrated with a video like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhyAAMpYGZA
And so you see, just as with the supposed real lyrics to Louie Louie, human understanding has its creative aspects which quite without all that electronic fol-de-rol can indeed lead to new cultural practices... such as knee-pooping.
I've seen several of their videos and I think this is the least effective example. The political campaign videos are funnier because there is more direct talking to the camera. Their take on Herman Cain is hilarious. The Buble video has too much repetition of the same lines and many that start or end offscreen or in profile.
The "Hear with your Eyes" video is definitely the McGurk effect, but I'm not sure whether BLR's video is properly called an example of the same effect, since it seems the McGurk effect actually consists of a *third* sound being generated by seeing the lip movements of "Sound 1" being put together with dubbed "Sound 2," to create a "Sound 3."
BLR just creates a new song that appears to fit the lip movements of the original, and we hear what he is singing clearly. The result is that it's hardly possible to tell that the new song isn't what the guy is really singing, but no *third* set of syllables is created (as far as I can tell, anyway). I think if BLR were to sing a second song in such a way so that we didn't hear it when we watched the video but actually heard a *third* song, then that would be the McGurk effect. But I'm not an expert on what constitutes a McGurk effect, so I may be wrong.
It is interesting, nonetheless, that the guy looks nice in the original video, but he seems rather creepy/funny/weird in the parody--despite looking exactly the same. I quite enjoyed both versions.
I'm fairly sure the video Tom Dark links to is not the McGurk effect either. It's really neat and amusing, though, and I've seen other videos like it. You can find more stuff like that by searching "misheard lyrics" on Youtube. Since I started watching those, I can't hear certain songs without hearing weird and unintended lyrics.
This has to do with our penchant for recognizing seemingly familiar sounds in sounds that are actually unrecognizable, just as Dusty Wallace mentioned. It explains various things such as why, as Shermer points out, we hear messages in songs played backwards, and it's also why people sometimes think they're hearing ghosts speak to them under the right conditions.
Here's another great one from BLR, featuring Herman Cain:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/02f13e1ed8/herman-cain-a-bad-lip-reading-soundbite
One of the things to bear in mind with the McGurk effect is that you are not being "fooled". You can know what the audio sounds like alone but if you watch the video again you will still hear the changed version. What you "hear" is not the sound, it's your brain's perception of the sound.
Similarly, people often think of a memory of a place to be akin to a picture, but instead the brain just remembers key data points and fills things in so it is remembered as a picture. For example, if you quickly show a photo to someone with an out of place object, they may remember the whole photo but leave out the object that the brain felt didn't belong.
I wish they had shown a demo of the McGurk effect as an intro to The Matrix - it would have given the line "what is, 'real'" more impact.
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