How approaching sounds can warp your perception of time
Everyone's perception of time is unique. It is a subjective experience shaped by factors such as age, emotions, memory and environmental contexts. And it may also be influenced by background noise, as scientists have demonstrated in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Previous research has shown that approaching noise can stretch our perception of time. But in this paper, researchers in Japan discovered that even when people were concentrating on a different sound, moving sounds in the background still changed their sense of time.
Measuring our sense of time
They recruited 48 college students and split them into three groups. Each participant was blindfolded and wore headphones so they could focus only on the sounds they heard.
One group heard background sounds that seemed to be approaching them. Another group heard receding sounds, while a third group heard scrambled sounds. All these background noises were made with software called the vOICe, which converts images into sound.
Additionally, all three groups were subjected to sine-wave tones of different durations in the foreground while the background noises were played. The volunteers were then asked to judge only the length of the foreground tones. As soon as the tone ended, they had to press and hold a computer spacebar for as long as they thought it had lasted. The research team then applied statistical analysis and a mathematical model to see how the background sounds changed each group's sense of time.
The experiment revealed that people who listened to the approaching background sound overestimated the length of the tones by about 15%. "We discovered that an approaching background sound significantly accelerated the perceived time when compared to a receding sound," the study authors wrote in their paper.
Participants in the receding background noise group underestimated the time by about 6%. Those in the scrambled noise group produced intermediate results. The differences between this group and the others were not statistically significant.
So what does all this mean? "Our study showed for the first time that background moving sounds modulate time estimation..."
Safety mechanism
The researchers framed the results in an evolutionary context. They said that an overestimation of time when an object is approaching means that our brains are put into a state of alertness to either avoid or catch something. An underestimation of time when a sound is moving away from us occurs because a retreating object is less likely to be perceived as a threat, and therefore it requires less attention.
The researchers also demonstrated the Vierordt effect, a well-known phenomenon that explains how our memory biases our estimation of time. Participants consistently guessed that the shortest tones (1 second) were longer than they were, while the longest tones (6 seconds) were guessed to be shorter.
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Publication details
Achille Pasqualotto et al, Approaching background sounds extend the duration of foreground auditory stimuli, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-58785-4
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Citation: How approaching sounds can warp your perception of time (2026, July 7) retrieved 14 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-approaching-warp-perception.html
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