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po1nt • yesterday at 9:06 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

The question is how are you able to internalise the shape without ever seeing any visualisation. Why does the the bouba even evoke curvature?


Replies

crazygringo • yesterday at 11:17 PM

Because sounds are made by shapes. The shapes of our mouths and the shapes of objects colliding. And sounds have shapes, shapes over time.

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Wolfenstein98k • yesterday at 9:52 PM

Maybe because when you pronounce a B, it's very hard to make it sound sharp. The lips rolling off one another naturally have a gentle ramp-up. It's really hard to have a sudden transient. You can record this in a free DAW and see it in front of you.

By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.

With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.

With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).

Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.

Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.

D-Machine • yesterday at 9:22 PM

Either similar underlying processing machinery (due to auditory and visual processing evolving from simpler and more interconnected processing circuits) or because when thinking of frequencies of waveforms in light/sound, visual sharpness and auditory sharpness really are the same thing (so even if they didn't co-evolve, it can be more efficient or useful to have some single underlying representation waveform representation that represents these things similarly).

notahacker • yesterday at 9:13 PM

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

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