This reminds me of another interesting phenomenon: priming. If you made up some snippet of speech that matched the rhythm in that example I would think I was hearing it plain as day. Here’s a funny example: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1944

The linked page has a table of audio snippets. Recordings in the right column contain a sentence of speech, one per row. The middle column contains that same sentence, distorted. Can you tell what the sentence is for each row without listening to the recording on the right?

If not, listen to the original and then listen to the distorted recording in the middle again. With this new information you’ll make out the distorted recordings easily. I also found that after cheating on the first two sentences I was able to identify the rest without listening to the original. My brain rapidly got better at teasing speech out of this particular deformation.

The amount of processing your brain does to ‘raw’ sensory input before you consciously perceive it is really surprising.

(Also, I wonder how possible it would be to identify the Bach fugue at the beginning of Bad Romance if you replaced 90% of it with silence. It’s already hard to recognize because it’s played so fast.)

One thing I found interesting: even though I told myself I was trying to figure out what the songs were, my brain was all like “let’s see if we can use our musical knowledge to predict what’s coming next instead!”