A: Hey, how are you?
B: just fine, how are you?
A: Doing good, just wanted to call and pick your brain about MEERELEEEREGLOMOMHREEM do you have a minute to talk?
B: yeah I'm not busy, but what did you say? It was garbled.
A: I said I just was thinking about MEERELEEEREGLOMOMHREEM and wanted to pick your brain about it.
B: about what again?
A: MEERELEEEREGLOMOMHREEM i was just thinking about it because REEEMWWWWEELEREE brought it up in the meeting yesterday with WEERLLELERRREE and I didn't really have a good answer for that.
B: hang on the call quality is really bad, I'm going to hang up and call you back.
A: ok no problem

***

A: ok, can you hear me now?
B: Yes I can hear you just fine. Now, what were you saying?
A: so anyway, like I was saying, in the meeting yesterday with WEERLLELERRREE, REEEMWWWWEELEREE brought up the topic of MEERELEEEREGLOMOMHREEM and I didn't really know what to say about that.
B: ****ING **** THIS IS RIDICULOUS, JUST ****ING EMAIL ME



Tell me this hasn't happened to you? I work in areas with bad reception so it happens to me daily. I know you will say it's random, and I will look like conspiracy theorist nutcase for disagreeing, but... I disagree. Like I said, it happens to me almost daily. Too much first hand observation to ignore. Care to humor this conspiracy theorist nutcase and posit an explanation, no matter how improbable?

The hypothesis that I am considering at the moment is that there might be some kind of augmentation applied to our calls. In cases of low bandwidth, it would require a lot less data to transmit a text string and read it out in the sender's voice on the other end, than it would to transmit the actual audio signal. And if this were happening, it would probably work best with known/common word combinations, IOW the "fluff."

That's why "in other words," "like I was saying," "can you hear me now?," and "pick your brain" come across just fine, they can be faithfully reconstructed on the local device but "packaging report database" would require server translation and therefore comes across as "MEERELEEEREGLOMOMHREEM."

How far out to lunch is that? Any better ideas?

 

The ability of the human brain to see patterns where none exists is amazing.

 

The audio codecs used for mobile phone calls are well documented, they don’t do anything like what you are suggesting.

With absolutely no insult intended, I would suggest that you are dealing with two things here. First, you may be correct in a way about what is happening but it is not firmware but wetware that is involved. We are very, very good at pattern matching. And fairly garbled but commonplace utterances are understandable thanks to that.

It may not be the mobile network and devices doing the “augmentation” but your own brain. Without measurement and/or careful documentation we can’t really know. Our memories are notoriously plastic, deforming according to the evolving narrative from both our own retellings/re-imaginings, and the the accounts we hear from others. So you really do remember what you report, in detail—but that doesn’t mean it happened.

The second thing is confirmation bias which we all have, it is part of the brain’s operation. When we, for some reason, start looking for something we note and recall all the times we see it but forget the many, many more times we don’t. It makes things like this very hard to determine unless there is documentation and not just “certainty” based on memories.

 

Perhaps you should have your hearing checked.

I know mine is starting to go and it's really annoying only being able to understand parts of speech.

 

The ability of the human brain to see patterns where none exists is amazing.

I didn't see that one coming!
/s

The second thing is confirmation bias which we all have, it is part of the brain’s operation. When we, for some reason, start looking for something we note and recall all the times we see it but forget the many, many more times we don’t. It makes things like this very hard to determine unless there is documentation and not just “certainty” based on memories.

I am well aware of this and I make deliberate attempts to override it. I have been thinking about this for days and I knew how it would sound, so before I made the decision to post it, I spent a few days mentally recording the times when my calls didn't go the way of the example I gave. There was one call where everything was too garbled to make out, and none where garbled part was insignificant.

We are very, very good at pattern matching. And fairly garbled but commonplace utterances are understandable thanks to that.

It may not be the mobile network and devices doing the “augmentation” but your own brain.

This, I hadn't really considered. The possibility that the whole call is garbled, but my brain fills in the gaps for patterns it recognizes. That's obviously a better answer than mine but I'm not really convinced; I will keep it in mind and try (somehow?) to listen more closely to the actual sounds I'm hearing instead of the words I am identifying. Maybe (probably) I will see that you're right.

I know our brains fill in the gaps with other senses. People are always surprised to learn that the green Cutlass they described to the police was actually a red Chevy. Last week I came through front door and a repulsive wave of poo smell washed over me. When I learned that it was actually chili cooking on the stove, a switch flipped in my head and it smelled totally different.

 

Perhaps you should have your hearing checked.

I know mine is starting to go and it's really annoying only being able to understand parts of speech.

I had my hearing tested in past year and it was normal.

 

I didn't see that one coming!
/s

The first rule is don't fool yourself because you are the easiest one to fool. Never trust your message retention memory unless you've been trained to remember message details verbatim by learning to hear in the now. Even that message retention is very short after months of training in code groups/voice to typing of network message traffic.


We learned to talk, listen, type, separate message streams while still smoking and drinking coffee.

 

I had my hearing tested in past year and it was normal

Normal for your age? There is no 'normal' without qualification.

 

Normal for your age? There is no 'normal' without qualification.

I don't know, it was for work, there was a graph, it had a pair of lines on it. The lines were above a threshold that represented hearing loss. If the result had been different I would have investigated, learned, and been more capable of informed discussion on this topic.