What do you hear when you watch this apparently silent GIF?

If you are hearing a thud then you need to look away – it’s not actually making any noise. If you’re cynical you haven’t even read the article and have jumped straight to the comments section to tell us to get a grip.

It was actually created in January 2008 when someone set a Photoshop challenge on b3ta.com.

However, there is a bit of science behind the GIF created by IamHappyToast.

An expert compared it to people associating colours with different sounds.

And Lisa DeBruine, from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, is looking into the phenomenon after finding that the majority of people said that they could hear it.

In a poll that she carried out on Twitter, some 70 per cent of people say that they can hear a thudding sound in a poll underneath the tweet which was posted yesterday.


Another 23 per cent say they don’t hear anything while the remainder believe that they experience something else.

Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering, told alphr.com ‘There are well known cases (synaesthesia) of sensory inputs crossing to other domains, e.g. people who associate colours with sounds, so it doesn’t surprise me that for some viewers a sound results.

‘We also tend to think of our senses as being separate, but our brain collates responses from all senses to work out what is going on. So I would say it is likely to be some effect in the brain rather than a physical effect like the acoustic reflex.’


The acoustic reflex is an involuntary muscle contraction in the ear when we speak or hear loud noises.

Muscles pull tightly within the ‘middle ear’ to protect the delicate machinery of the inner ear from being damaged.

The reflex is mostly used against deeper, low-frequency sounds, such as the noise from a massive object colliding with the floor.

Some experts suggest the dull thud people hear when watching the Gif is the sound of this reflex closing up part of our ear as we anticipate a loud noise.

Others claim the illusion is not a physical reflex, but the result of our brain tightly linking different sensory responses.

Because we closely associate the ‘sight’ of a big collision with the sound of a loud thud, our brains generate the noise for us, an ‘auditory illusion’.
Source: Metro, anon

Follow us
Share this article