system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do ventriloquists throw their voice to make it sound like it's coming from somewhere else?
gpt
The voice is not being "thrown" in any way.


Here is how it works:

* Your brain has the experience of seeing mouths move and hearing voices over and over and over your whole life.

* You learn, kind of, the general timings and movements a mouth makes when it says a word or phrase.

* Now, when they do a trick, they use another person or object (like a doll or mouth-like thing).

* They say things, and those things "match" (remember the above) what the mouth is doing on the other object (If it's a person, usually they control the timing of the other person through some method, like tapping them behind the back or at an angle you can't see)

**At this point** your brain assumes the voice is coming from the mouth, since your brain generally assumes that things that happened consistently before are what is happening now, and tricks you into thinking the voice is coming from the moving object.

*Also*, the person who *is* speaking doesn't move their mouth, which further makes your brain "assume" they aren't the ones saying the words.