7 ms·
Teach yourself to echolocate (2018)
- Centigonal 2y agorelevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD3Y1l8XyUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD3Y1l8XyUw It appears that the hardest part of echolocation for humans is the "produce a directed, crisp click" part. The "process the sound" part is readily handled by our brains with a relatively mild learning curve.
- yapyap 2y ago[flagged]
- browningstreet 2y agoE- chocolate E- chocolate Don’t get it. Oh..!
- Sn0wCoder 2y agoLOL, I passed by the article a few times reading the same thing. When I finally clicked in thinking it was something to do with the windows package manager. Something about the capital E. As soon as it was spelled with the little e, it clicked.
- mrblampo 2y agoYep same. "Teach yourself to eat chocolate."
- acosmism 2y agohad a french voice in my head going "teache yourself to eatee chocolate"
- webspinner 2y agoSounds good to me!
- patja 2y agoThere is a wonderful book about the blind man who was probably one of the earliest innovators in using a cane for echolocation. "A Sense of the World" by Jason Roberts is the story of James Holman, who traveled the world in the early 19th century despite being blind, often being in a great deal of pain, and having limited mobility.
- hackernewds 2y agoWow it just struck me that the cane is for echolocation and not just obstacles. I did learn that the blind have keenly adjusted hearing.
- fao_ 2y agoBlind people can use a cane for echolocation, but it's not necessarily reliable (especially in a busy city), and to be honest I'm hard-pressed thinking of any blind people I know that actually know how to do that.
- high_priest 2y agoThey are probably constantly aware of surfaces the cane is bouncing off & use it as a redundant confirmation of what they "see" by touch
- lynx23 2y agoWha? Well, there are blind people who barely know how to use their cane, but... Let me explain. Manfred Spitzer once wrote that he thinks there are two groups of people on this planet who really have good audio location capabilities. Blind people and conductors. Conductors because they need to be able to listen to a particular performer, to isolate them from the rest of the orchester. And blind people, because we use the ear to navigate the world. Now, I actually use everything around me as a source of sound. Tapping with the cane is one of them. However, if I want to "scan" my environment, I usually make a clicking noise with my tongue. But those are the a small part of the game. The rest of the noises I use come from outside. Just a small example, before I loose myself in thsi comment: I can hear poles and trees on the sidewalk. Not because they emit so much sound, but because they eat it up. If a car drives behind the pole along the street, I can actually hear the point where the external sound doesn't reach me, infering that there must be a pole or a tree. Echo location is not always about what you send. Its m6ore about you learning how the sound waves around you behave. Sometimes, but this is getting borderline esoteric, I can hear the materials involved. Walking towards a wooden wall sounds destinctly different from walking towards a concrete wall...
- hypertexthero 2y agoMaybe only distantly related to this, but thought it worth sharing that when I visited Seattle for the first time this year I caught a show by a band called La Cerca at Central Saloon and loved their song “Echolocation”, with ethereal sounding guitars, including the bass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NYeqA2Kve8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NYeqA2Kve8
- AIFounder 2y ago[dead]
- pkoird 2y agoHere's an idea, use a (portable) ultrasound emitter device that sends a pulse every set second and use an earpiece receiver that produces equivalent acoustics in audible range. The setup may reduce "tongue-fatigue' and the ultrasound will travel farther and can reflect off smaller objects. Would be an interesting experiment if nothing else.
- bezmiran 2y agoI suspect it would be a very challenging problem for the earpiece part to recreate the directional info as well as our own ears, since the brain's ability to detect the direction of sounds depends on the shape of the ear itself. Maybe a simple mechanical clicker device like those used for dog training could be a useful tool.
- zafka 2y agoI have one of these - purpose built for blind people to use. Pretty sure I picked it up at a NFB convention in Atlanta around the turn of the century. (NFB = National Federation of the blind)
- mmooss 2y agoHow well does it work?
- zafka 2y agoI will get back to you on that. I just found it in my desk. I myself am sighted, and have never used it for echo location - yet. Looking at it I realized that it was given out by my old employer: Blazie engineering. Coincidentally, I just ran into the founder recently. Next time I see him, I will ask him about the feedback he got on these clickers. I will say that after twenty years in a drawer it sounds good to my uneducated ears.
- 31carmichael 2y ago
- dataviz1000 2y agoMeanwhile, after reading this article, I have my face one inch from a wall making clicks to see if I can hear the echo. Hopefully, nobody sees, or hears, me.
- mmooss 2y agoWe understand you. <3
- mmooss 2y agoI don't have much sense of the reasonably expected or maximium performance of this ability. They give a few sensational demonstrations, but how accurate is it (as in complete, correct, and consistent)? How fast? In what environments? How granular? Is it practical for everyday use? For some interesting context, here is a description of dolphin echolocation: https://www.britannica.com/animal/cetacean/ https://www.britannica.com/animal/cetacean/ "The amount of information obtained by an echolocating dolphin is similar to that obtained with the eyes of a sighted human. ... Toothed whales use extremely high frequencies, on the order of 150 kilohertz, for refining spatial resolution from their echoes. They are capable of “seeing” into and through most soft objects such as other dolphins, though the effectiveness of toothed whale echolocation drops off at distances greater than about 100 metres." Maybe with enough practice ...
- hackernewds 2y agoSounds travels very differently in terms of velocity scatter etc in water though. If somehow dolphins were capable, they would not nearly have the same echolocation capability on land
- deegles 2y agoI have tinnitus and can't hear much in a range around 4.5khz... I wonder if this would still work for me
- webspinner 2y agoI also have tinnitus. I need to get my hearing checked. I have an appointment coming up.
- amatecha 2y agoI noticed when I was younger that I can "hear" when I'm near a wall, or just generally get a sense of the size of space I'm in solely via sound, but it never occurred to me to make a "ping" to sense the resulting sound reflections! Super interesting - I will have to try this. Probably my prior spatial sense from hearing was based on really subtle background noise of either my own footsteps or just environmental sounds reflecting around, I guess? I always felt like I am "hearing the room I'm in" but never quite knew how else to describe the sensation, but knowing people quite literally make a clicking noise to echolocate suddenly makes it much more clear!
- jcims 2y agoComb filtering (https://youtu.be/Amj4UevyRfU?si=5pwjHKwAw6bdmG2x https://youtu.be/Amj4UevyRfU?si=5pwjHKwAw6bdmG2x) plays a role in this. I was listening to a podcast and realized I could hear the speaker turning pages under the microphone by the way it affected their voice in the microphone rather than the rustle of the page. It was pretty wild. I could ‘see’ it before i recognized what was going on.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y agoThanks for the video, I wouldn’t have guessed it shows well on a video. Kinda off topic but I’m on a brand new phone (not logged in and no history) and the next video suggested by YouTube is a French fascist promoting (actual) nazis policies. Why would YouTube do that?! It has absolutely zero connection with audio topics. I just have my OS language set to French. That’s so worrying for the youth with being exposed to pure hate for no reason.
- almd 2y agoThis is often used by audio mixing engineers and taught in a roundabout way at schools and studios. We think a lot about where thins “sit” in the mix. Proximity wise, and even height wise in a stereo mix. Eventually you learn how to locate things in headphones and it’s a really weird sensation when you realize you can do it. The kicker is we start out by simulating real environments in mixes, but then end up having to simulate what people expect from the medium as opposed to real life. For example something I learned doing video audio, if someone is writing something on a train, viewers expect to hear the pen on paper. But irl, there’s not a chance it’s audible. Explosions are always distorted because microphones end up clipping due to the volume, etc. A great book on spatial simulation is The Art of Mixing by David Gibson. Older but forever relevant
- hackernewds 2y agoYou went on quite many topics there. Could you expand on the proximity and height? Fascinating The closest analogue I can think of is how due to practice now anyone can close their eyes and imagine typing entire essays how they know exactly where the keys are. Try it.
- high_priest 2y agoI have played alot of videogames & at some point identified, how can I guess, the source of sounds. Guess, because it's nowhere near actual approximation. Most often, source is guessed by context. E.g. The door knocking sound illusion, which was used to troll streamers. Then you have directional localisation based on delay between ears, difference in volume & properties of reverberations. Things to the sides are going to arrive in either ear at different moment. Add source if first echo & you have confirmation that a sound is coming from either right or left. The more directly to the side is the sound, the bigger the delay between ears is, so you get approximate angle. Now we consider sound muffling, caused by shape of our head & ears. Things in front are going to sound clearer in the opposite ear, than sounds from the back. The same principle is used for detection of height. Things below are going to get muffled, things above will be clearer. In reality, feeling sounds with the whole body helps in source localisation, which can't be emulated with headphones.
- sorwin 2y agoI'm curious if people with aphantasia would also be able to create a "mind map" of the area around them
- Eduard 2y agoit's somewhere between silly and mischievous that AtlasObscura provides cute visual drawings yet fails to provide acoustic examples.
- schoen 2y ago(2018)
- djtango 2y agoI'm so glad this is surfacing. I remember reading about the skepticism scientists had about this only for them to be finally proven wrong. My anecdotal experience is that we are so out of touch with our bodies these days that we routinely underestimate just how adaptable we truly are if we have the will or need to learn. So I get frustrated when very useful things like echolocation are suppressed by ignorant and cynical scientists who are unaware of their blind sides because they think they studied hard and read a bunch of papers. Our realities are shaped by our own experiences but what is sad is when people then shape other people's realities based on their own skewed realities. I'm glad that the internet is so good at spreading disparate, niche and folky knowledge and forcing scientists to reconsider their priors more often.
- dotancohen 2y agoWhy am I seeing so many comments disparaging "lofty elite scientists" lately? Every scientist I know is a very curious person, more willing than most to listen to the most outlandish ideas people come up with.
- eschneider 2y agoThis is really interesting. As someone who's been gradually losing his vision, I've noticed some of this stuff on my own, but it's nice to see a good writeup so one doesn't have to figure out everything from first principles. Just one more thing to add to my bag of tricks.
- lazycrazyowl 2y agoI initially misread it as “Treat yourself to a chocolate”
- eddd-ddde 2y agoI misread as "Teach yourself to e-chocolate" and was even more confused.
- gnarlouse 2y agoTeach yourself to echocolate
- croisillon 2y agoRelated: - Humans Can Learn to Echolocate (Livescience, 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699105 - How humans echolocate 'like bats' (BBC, 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16782557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16782557 - Humans Can Learn How to 'Echolocate' in 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows (Sciencealert, 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27404132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27404132 - Teach yourself to echolocate - 106 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334
- koinedad 2y agoI’m wondering if we use it more than we think. When I have my headphones in with noise cancelling on I’m more inclined to bump something in my house I normally wouldn’t or misjudge a distance etc. Pretty crazy to think about forming a subconscious, audio-based world
- alentred 2y agoA few years ago, I was a frequent visitor to a public swimming pool, same day, same time. Apparently with similar swimming habits, there was an elderly person who was humming all the time. In the pool, in the shower, in the lobby, rather loud but not too much. I initially attributed it to elderly quirkiness. It was only after several encounters that I realized he was blind. The point is, I only figured that out when I saw him with a white cane outside, not at all by the way he moved inside or used the objects - he was navigating the space just like anyone else, and it was a rather crowded place. That was the day I learned that echolocation in humans is a thing.
- Doxin 2y agoI feel like a pool is an especially good place for it too. Everything is hard surfaces, providing a good echo. The ambient noise probably helps a lot too with not needing to make noise yourself.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]