Not Everyone Experiences the World the Same Way: Counting Stars Edition

I’ve written about linguistic relativity before but here’s another perception-is-relative reference point. I was recently discussing with some friends how one of their parents has a hearing blip where a certain frequency just doesn’t register for him but he otherwise has normal hearing. I mentioned that I have the opposite problem - there was an extremely popular song a few years ago that hurts me to hear due to the repeated high-pitched screech that’s been accidentally built into the soundtrack.

I have always been confident that it’s accidental and that most people can’t hear it because it is an extremely undesirable sound. If everyone experienced the song the way I do, there’s no way it could be popular; I had to scramble to change radio stations or playlists when it came on because it’s legitimately painful to listen to. To me it sounds like an audio feedback squeal but it’s very high in pitch. If you’ve ever heard a TV set that’s on but not playing, or an elevator waiting for its doors to be unblocked, it’s in that kind of register but piercing. If not - well, I can hear if a TV is on or if someone is blocking elevator doors with their bag even though they’re certain they’re inside because those pieces of equipment do make a kind of whining noise in those circumstances… and I can also hear this horrible sound in the song. If I had to listen to the whole song and then you told me my ears were bleeding a little, I would probably believe you. I can’t think of another song I’ve heard that has this problem.

My friends obviously asked me what song this was. I couldn’t immediately recall because I spent a lot of time trying not to listen to it… but the trauma of the shriek was burned into my brain and I did hear the opening sequence a lot before managing to switch it off so I was able to remember enough preceding lyrics that I could research and ID it as OneRepublic’s Counting Stars. According to Wikipedia, this song reached billboard number two in the US, number one in a bunch of countries, and is the 14th most played video on YouTube as of a few months ago. People in general really like this song.

As would presumably be expected, my friends then listened to it themselves and couldn’t hear it. I wanted to see if I could find any substantiation of my issue with it online for them - and I did! Though as expected, only from a very small minority of people relative to those who’ve been exposed to the song. I don’t know if you’ll find any of this as funny as I did since of course odds are you can’t hear the problem either, but I am amused to have found my people and thought I’d share:

Here’s a Reddit thread about the issue, with timestamps about when it occurs. (A couple responders can’t hear it but don’t recognize that, and so their answers are about normal audio effects. Communication problems do crop up with relativity studies.) Another Reddit user lists it as a ruined song, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Here’s an upset-yet-supportive Amazon review.

Here’s a Twitter thread with the band. (Again, since they can’t hear it, they think people are talking about different sounds which results in a fair amount of confused and inaccurate cross-talk.)

Here’s an edited version of the song that removes the problem, with hilarious comments supporting the change.

Kudos to both the listeners who white-knuckled their way through the song to timestamp it and the editors who then invested time into removing the sounds from the song (there’s more than one edit out there as I guess several people independently wanted to fix it!). I also thought it interesting that most people are describing it as a “squeak,” as to me that’s too diminutive a label for its sharp intensity and implies additional variance in how it’s heard even by those who do hear it. I side with one commenter who instead described it as an “ice pick to the brain.”

One of my friends did follow up to share that upon listening at 25% speed - YouTube offers that option! - she could discern it and found it annoying. So if you want to potentially ruin the song for yourself, you can give that a try.

I wonder what other experiences set each one of us apart from the crowd - both the ones we’ve sussed out and the ones we might never recognize.

Intercambiador ACART Residency Journal 4

Some random observations:

1) I am quite tall for the Iberian Peninsula (both Portugal and Spain).  Headrests on buses and cars hit me in the back and I tower over pretty much all of the women and many of the men.  I'm only very slightly taller than average (5'6" with average being 5'5" for women) in the USA, so it's weird feeling so very tall.

2) Madrid is a dog city.  I noted that when I was here in 2007, too, and I love seeing all the dogs.  I get to pet and play with a few particularly friendly ones, too, and that's grand.  I do wish it was less of a dog poop city, though.  Many people do pick up their dog's poop with little baggies and toss it away appropriately, but many also do not.

3) Travelers' diarrhea is really unpleasant.  I kept getting it here the first few weeks and can't figure out what the precise culprit is.  I feel that since I lived here once before (admittedly ten years ago) it is wholly unfair that it keeps happening (three separate occasions thus far).

4) Madrid is getting ever so slightly better with vegetarianism, but it's still very hard to be vegetarian here if you want to eat out.

5) Despite having lived here before and this being the case in other cities I've done residencies in as well, I'm still not entirely used to shops closing from 2-5pm.  I like the European mindset toward work-life balance, but I'd prefer shift workers such that the stores could stay open.

6) If you live without A/C in constant 100-103*F weather, having one day that's overcast and merely 96*F feels markedly better.

7) Many Spaniards really don't speak English.  I do speak enough Spanish to get along, but Fari doesn't speak any Spanish and I think she's surprised at how much it hinders her here - for a big European city like Madrid, the proportion who don't speak English is probably higher here than almost anywhere else of a similar size.

8) The flat I'm in has no microwave, no oven, and no pot with a lid.  This severely hampers what I am able to cook.  I'm also nervous that eating fresh fruit and vegetables is part of what's contributing to the traveler's diarrhea.  As a result, I'm eating out a lot.

9) People drink non-alcoholic beer here surprisingly often.  I typically only see it on offer in Muslim-run restaurants in the US.  I only drink decaf coffee, so I get liking the taste of something but not the drug within it - but the cheap beer served everywhere here, Mahou, is to me not something I would prefer to other drinks without the alcohol...

10) There are more Asian immigrants here than ten years ago - a lot more.  I used to walk around with an Asian friend in 2007 and people would scream "china" and run over to stare at her like she was in a zoo; nowadays there are "Chinese bazaars" on almost every street run by Asian immigrants.

11) There's a couple species of invasive small green parrot here.   The more common one, the Argentinian parrot, has a very loud, annoying call.  They're surprisingly hard to pin down in photos, but I've encountered them a few times.