Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Have you heard? There’s a video game out for the Nintendo DS, Baby Pals, in which a virtual baby can be heard to coo “Islam is the light!” in the midst of bath time. You don’t believe me? Then I would ask you—no, beg you—to watch this video clip from WPRI news, in which the correspondent states with perfect certainty that the message is definitely “Islam is the light,” and then hints ominously that “Nintendo says the game is made by a third party, and that it is not responsible for the game’s content.”

Sometimes, I wish I was as dumb as these people, so that maybe I could just let it go.  But you all know I can’t.

So let me get this straight, American Housewife. You believe that Crave Entertainment, a third-rate game studio at best, created a game called Baby Pals, a game advertised with this website, for the purpose of disseminating hidden messages that will indoctrinate your child into Islam? This makes sense to you?  You believe this?  You are willing to say it out loud, on television, in front of a functioning camera?

I’m going to refrain from saying anything about your ludicrous paranoia, ridiculous small-mindedness, or implicit bigotry (although you should seriously consider putting your child up for adoption, for his sake), and instead skip to the science behind this mishap. You know, the part where reality intersects with logic and facts.

First, this has happened before. Similar controversies have erupted from seemingly innocuous toys based on the Little Mermaid, Elmo, and the Teletubbies (twice). In fact, the exact same “Islam is the light!” sound popped up a few months ago in the Fisher-Price Cuddle and Coo Doll. Behold the face of terror. The fact that this exact same sound cropped up in two separate products indicates the use of a stock sound from an effects studio, not unlike the famous “Doom Door” noise that I swear has shown up in every low-rent science fiction show that I have ever watched.  So maybe instead of a covert Islamist game studio, we’re dealing with a covert Islamist sound studio.

No.  No we are not.  Let me introduce you to my new friend, sine wave speech. Listen to the “SWS” clip for Sentence 1. Can you understand what is being said, or does it all sound like the whisperings of a Dalek? Now listen to the corresponding “Original” clip.  Finally, listen to the “SWS” clip again.  Ah yes.  Of course.  How could you not have heard that?

This rather nicely demonstrates a simple fact of perception:  given an ambiguous stimulus, our brains will do quite a lot of work to fill in the details.  A person’s expectations are extremely powerful in these situations, particularly in regards to speech perception.  In casual conversation, native speakers drop many critical speech sounds.  We mean “I don’t know,” but it really comes out as “I dunno.”  This is easy to decipher for a native speaker, who comes to the conversation with certain expectations about his language, but quite difficult for someone who is just beginning to learn English.

So, what we really have here is a poorly recorded sound coming out of a poorly built speaker.  The sound is highly ambiguous.  The baby could be saying “Islam is the light,” but could just as plausibly be saying “Is mama’s delight,” or, most likely, the baby is uttering complete gibberish.  It all depends on your expectation.  This ridiculous incident reveals not a terror plot or a subversive propaganda campaign, but rather, the delusional cognitive processes of a housewife with too much damn time on her hands.

And oh yeah, this is another reason why local news broadcasts are completely worthless.