The Tritone Paradox

This recording presents four pairs of tones, each pair separated by three whole tones, or half an octave. Curiously, some listeners hear the interval as ascending, others as descending. (In fact the tones used are ambiguous as to octave, so there’s no objectively right answer.)

Even more curiously, sometimes a listener’s perception reverses when an interval is transposed, say from C-F# to G#-D, even though nothing else has changed.

Diana Deutsch discovered the effect in 1986.