The ear substitutes a real partial for a just-damped piano tone

Evidence

Get a powerful bass voice to sing E flat to the vowel O, in sore (more like aw in saw than o in so), gently touch B flat on the piano, which is the 12th or third partial tone of E flat, and let its sound die away while you are listening to it attentively. The note B-flat on the piano will appear really not to die away, but to keep on sounding, even when its string is damped by removing the finger from the digital, because the ear unconsciously passes from the tone of the piano to the partial tone of the same pitch produced by the singer, and takes the latter for continuation of the former. But when the finger is removed from the key, and the damper has fallen, it is of course impossible that the tone of the string should have continued sounding. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2176

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• CANDY: Helmholtz’s 150-year-old party trick where a singer’s partial makes a dying piano note seem to keep sounding.

Related

• The ear unconsciously substitutes same-pitch partials to continue a decaying note (similarity 0.95)
• A pianoforte with raised dampers can physically re-echo sung vowels via sympathetic resonance (similarity 0.79)
• A piano with dampers down can reproduce recognizable speech (similarity 0.79)
• Perceived pitch persists even when the matching frequency partial is absent (similarity 0.79)