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I've wondered if you could make a device to help people with this - basically just a little clicker that would emit the ideal click once per second. I've also w
by ALittleLight 4y ago
I've wondered if you could make a device to help people with this - basically just a little clicker that would emit the ideal click once per second. I've also wondered if it would work to have the clicker emit a higher or lower frequency than humans can hear and to be accompanied by headphones or a hearing aid that could hear the click. That way, you could use the clicker without annoying or distracting everyone around you.
- hammock 4y agoWhat makes the ideal click?
- ALittleLight 4y agoI don't know - if I were actually going to make this device I'd try to figure it out by talking to people who can echolocate, people who do signal processing, scientists studying echolocation in bats and whales - etc.
- salty_biscuits 4y agoAutocorrelation is a delta function. Basically a random known signal, so you can disambiguate simply from background noise (look into matched filters).
- hirvi74 4y agoPerhaps the clickers used in dog training.
- rthomas6 4y agoNaively I would assume the closest you can get to an impulse function, aka a Dirac delta function, because it contains all frequencies at once. So, as loud and short of a sound as possible. This should give you the most information about your surroundings from listening to the echo, because different frequencies can reflect differently in a room. Also because mathematically an impulse convolved with a function returns the function, so an impulse gives you the most neutral echo with which to compare.
- hirvi74 4y agoYou could just build off a metronome, no?
- actionfromafar 4y agoI don't think headphones would be as useful, or at least, it would tie you to that device. Even the crinkles in our ear lobes affect how we appreciate and model the room in our brains. So instead you would depend on the microphone characteristics, if you changed it, you would have to re-learn until you are used to it. If we are tying ourselves to a device, we might just as well increase the smarts of the device itself. It could have cameras, lidar and eco-location. It could output coded sounds in earphones representing small and large objects, speeds, etc. Eventually the brain would synthesize.
- vdqtp3 4y agoI expect you would want the sound source to be in a static position relative to your ears - if you're trying to determine the distance between you and a wall 3 feet away, moving the sound source by a couple feet would change everything about the echo