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Echolocation for Humans
anoopsinha writes "An article in New Scientist reports that bat echos can be used as virtual reality guide. People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a 'virtual insect', using only the echolocation sounds. The report says that it is a 'very intuitive process.' The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks."
When you drive, you can't look at the speedometer and the road at the same time,
That's what I tried to tell him...
The coolest voice ever.
We did some experiments with this in cognitive theory class, and it was really, really bizarre.
I heard about something on a TV show a few years ago. It talked about some guy who was training deaf people to "echolocate" using clicks. Supposedly, they were able to walk, tell the diff between walls and shrubs, and even skateboard. Does anyone know about this?
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Can someone explain to me what the article is trying to say? I know that we developed eyesight to see the world around us and bats developed ultrasonic sound and ears to percieve it. But, how is becoming "batman" going to help improve our situation?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
and they still havent helped me pick up the perfect who-likes-short-shorts bat woman.
sorry, i forgot to mention that this was real. it wasnt some sci-fi/fantasy thing
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Maybe I missed something, but can't this be used to help the blind navigate around their homes or even outdoors? It's the first thing I would think of rather than fighter pilots.
but as a true bat aficionado, he is just happy to know what it is like to be a bat.
Someone ought to let Nagel know.
The coolest voice ever.
I remember some 5 or 6 years ago I saw a story on some daytime talk show about people overcoming their disabilities; not that it's all that unusual, but one guest in particular who has been blind since birth, actually used echolocation to get around. He made regular clicking sounds with his tounge and he could navigate down a city street without any real assistance. It was actually quite amazing. Although, I don't know any blind fighter pilots but the principal is sound. Humans do have echolocation abilities, it would just take a long time time to develop any natural ability.
Holy smoke! The penguin thinks he can escape us into that smokescreen! Quick, Robin, give me the bat-sonar-headphones!
What you hear in Star Wars isn't sound in space, it's echolocation technology.
Though you'd have to neutralize for relatively high velocity, and map to a different signal entirely (probably radio), before converting into sound... Doppler would tell you relative speed, and you would need some sort of tracking system (headset/goggles + sensors?) to locate your ears...
GPL Deconstructed
This is the sickest sensory innovation since the telescope.
--
make install -not war
...welcome our new bat overlords.
So you mean all this time I've been getting banned from game servers for using mods to see everyone, it was a power all humans can develop?! Unfair!
SAILING MISHAP
David Dunn's Angels and Insects, although not a study of audio based VR (or even featuring bat sounds for that matter), is a great place to get started listening to microscopic sounds.
Here's an MP3 of some insects in Africa getting it on.
If you think this stuff sounds like fun you might want to do what I did a few years ago and pick up a high quality microphone with a big diaphragm, such as an AKG C414, and get out into the woods at night and make some recordings. You'll be surprised what's out there when you start filtering out the sounds humans make and crank the volume!!
I imagine that with time and practice, the echolocation could become intuitive at greater complexities. The brain has a good capacity to adapt to tasks, it would be interesting to see how it adapts to a new sense. Anyway, I definitly want one.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I bet I could get a blind-deaf person to navigate using only taste! Strap two solar cells to their forehead and run the wires to opposite sides of their tongue! Hey, it's only 1-pixel stereo vision, but better than nothing.
...
WWAAAAY back in quake2 I could track exactly where my opponents were on a map, as long as I was wearing headphones. The headphones were necessary to get the stereoimaging right, as speakers can be a bit difficult to set up. So how is this at all suprising?
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to echolocate people moving around me while I'm near a CRT -- especially when I'm sitting at a computer. I can...shall we say, "feel" the movements of people behind me. (It's a spatial sense. Not sure how else to describe it.) It's not as if I can tell what they're doing with their hands or anything detailed like that (you know, dodging projectiles and such), but I'm aware of their general position.
So now, of course, my primary machine has an LCD. No more echolocation. (Luckily, it's a laptop, so I can keep my back to the wall.) I don't have the 15.7 KHz whine of an electron tube to bounce off things around me. Ye gods, that infernal CRT whine...most people can't hear it, but it drives me bats.
Oh dear. In all honesty, I wasn't trying to pun.
just make sure you don't get accused of wallhacking and then banned from life...
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Damn, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time! Imagine having a second set of low grade eye that worked in the dark. You could do all sorts of cool things with it, like effectively having a set of eyes on the back of your head.
The article mentions one potential application being that you could look at dials and switces without taking your eyes off what you were doing. However, would shifting your attention to echo location be as bad as looking away would? Think cell phones. It's kind of like chameleons - they can point their eyes in different directions, but can they concentrate on both of them at the same time? Could humans gain the ability to concentrate on more than one sensory input at a time? Probably not, but the input would still be there and would catch our attention anytime something notable happened. Like when we see something out of the corner of our eye, or hear our name in a crowd. Cognetics is so cool.
It also talked about how bats adjust the frequency of the waves sent out, as the distance to the object changes. I imagine for a bat this would be as automatic as focusing our eyes is to us. We would have to do this manualy, like focusing a camera. Oh, but what if we interfaced the brain or some nerves and trained the mind to do the focusing!
I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident I would be pounding down doors at universities acrossed the country to find one willing to attempt to use the nerves once controlling my limb to instead control a keyboard/mouse type interface (which would comunicate to the PC via bluetooth eventually). But this is even cooler, and I imagine provided a little information from Dean waters on this, you could build something like this on your own. Hot damn, I have a new project!
Or imagine a radar system encoding direction, distance and speed of a target into some surround sound system...
To me, especially the threat warning system looks interesting, because you can hear something even if it's behind you, while your eyes only see stuff in front of you. Imagine, the advantage if you can hear at once that that radar site that just started chirping seems to be in the direction of the depression in the ridge you just passed so you can do something about it, or the fighter radar that just started chirping is at your 6 o'clock - that guy is in a bad position... wait, now he's switched from search to attack mode - now you're in trouble... ;-]
Or if you could hear the drone of your wingman - you'd definitely hear if he gets out of position...
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
As anyone with bad hearing in one ear (like me) will attest, stereo location using sound is a very weak sense. Having worked with stereoscopic 3D images for many years, I have found that about 10-20% of all people have vision problems in one eye that are just bad enough that they can't see the stereographic effect. I expect that similarly, there are enough people with weak hearing in one ear, enough to prevent a similarly large group from using audio stereolocation.
Pong.... Pong.... Pong
I've been doing this for ages - there is a hallway at work where the light switch is at the far end of the hall.. in winter, the hall is completely dark after 4PM or so.
:o) so I don't need to make 'extra' sounds..
making clicks with your tongue or other brief sounds
Actually, I just use my footfalls - I've got extremely sensitive hearing (I always know where our cat is because I can hear his footfalls on the carpet - which freaked out my wife for the first few years
this probably only works if there is only one "clicker" in the area. Otherwise you'd get your echoes confused with the others, with embarassing results. Also, there must be some relatively low velocity limit, since your interpretation of the echo likely depends on (your knowledge of) the origination point of the audio source. I bet parking meters and telephone poles are quite stealthy against this technology. Rather than trying to navigate yourself down a straight hallway alone, try blindfolding a bunch of people and get them to echolocate around a circle - better than twister!
Sure, no problem.
The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks.
Modern Science, innovating new ways of killing our fellow man more effectively!
I also saw something on using echolocation with blind people a while back, according to the story, it doesn't take long for users to adapt. Saying that, Blind people have very sensitive hearing anyway.
kill elrond
take elrond
put elrond in cupboard
ZZzzzz....mzzzhzzz...zzzehzzzzz...zzzzz.z...(smack , jump, shuffle, smack)...silence.
Who needs headphones?
but.. tihs is aonhter ltitle kwon slkil
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
bite my glorious golden ass.
This was actually used in the show Babylon 5. If I am remembering the posts online by the exec. producer and main writer, JMS, he said that they wanted to use sound effects for space battles but also wanted to be accurate to the reality of space where there shouldn't be any sound.
So the technique they used was to describe the sound effects as assistive to the pilots like full surround sound in video games to give a viceral sense the position of the other things around. They maybe explained that a total of once of twice on the series itself, but the idea stuck with me as a very good idea even in the relatively normal environment of todays fighter jets or even for situational awareness in cars on the highway.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
freeing up their eyes for other tasks eh?
such as porn! yes yes!
-judging another only defines yourself
Too bad Creative killed off Aureal.
I've compared the 3D-sound of an SBLive! and an Aureal Vortex, barring CPU cycle-chomping, Aureal's solution wins hands down because it mimics reality. (uses a method similar to raytracing to bounce sound off walls realistically).
I can track oponents simply by ear on Unreal Tournament.
I haven't tried the SB Audigy though.
Dang Creative... now there aren't decent drivers for Diamond MX300's on Win2k/XP...
Not really. You're thinking in terms of radar, where azimuth and range are determined by matching a single ping with a single pong. In such systems, multiple sources or multiple path replies are a source of confusion since they add too much information to the process. If you're trying to paint a sonic landscape, however, you don't want to try and associate a single ping and pong since that would only identify the range to a single reflector in one small portion of your area of interest. Instead, you want to receive as much information about the environment as possible from each ping. Having someone/something else making the ping isn't a problem as long as they don't overwhelm the replies.
As an experiment, try sitting in a place with a fair amount of white noise (such as CPU fans). Now slowly bring your right hand toward your ear with your palm open. The first thing you'll notice is a loss of some higher frequency ambient sounds from the right side. As the hand gets closer, you may notice an increase in reflected noises that originated on your left. Eventually you will be able to judge the distance between your ear and your palm simply by the tone of the noise.
a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks
The Airforce already has been developing this already, not with echolocation though. It was shown on discovery channel or something. Uses a more efficient system.Aircraft uses sensors to measure position of other aircraft in the vicinity then onboard computer replicates positions in 3D audio space fed to Pilot's Helmet.
And it works. It helps track entities that are outside of the line of sight of the pilot.
Been done years ago by Aureal A3D anyway. Too bad Creative Killed 'em off, ate em up and didn't utilize their technology (Audigy uses a different system -- check out 3dsoundsurge.com).
I've got An SBLive and an A3D 3.0 soundcard. The A3D sounds sweeter and is better in hunting down opponents "echolocationally".
I'm sorry officer I was trying to drive by echolocation but I forgot to take the headphones off...
This is my sig.
so does anyone know how to build a device that could be used for echolocation?
i remember my science teacher having a handheld microphone with a concave disk around it. would it be possible to put a "clicker" on top of something like that and listen for echo?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
For a perfect example and a damn fine tense mini-game check out Dueling Machine by Thatcher Ulrich (last game at the bottom of the page). You may need some Wads. This was created at the 0th Indie Game Jam. From the site:
-)----- BWish I could remembered my account so I could get some karma. Oh well, back to the booze.
so escatology can help me in a drunken stupor?
itadakimasu
I was about to launch into cries of "idiot", "troll", and "crazy man", but two lines into your post I totally realized what was going on. That's pretty amazing stuff! And a bit spooky too when you're reading away at normal speed and know exactly what it says.
It does, however, highlight the importance of context and knowledge, since Cmabrigde could be read as anything if we didn't all know about Cambridge.
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...see also here.
~Idarubicin
What sorts of systems could this be used for in a fighter plane. I could guess as some sort of range finder or other indicator, but I would imagine that the utility would be limited to something of that nature, plus it would probably require some sort of crazy surround sound headset.
Perhaps I was a little too quick with my praise and enthustiasm. I just took a bunch of sentences and ran similar scrambling processes over them, and some were quite unreadable. I think that, perhaps, the original sentence was carefully constructed to be scrambled, yet easy to read, in order to spread the meme. Perhaps?
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How can bats flying blindly detect 1/100 inch wires from several feet away, dodge stalactites in pitch-dark caves, catch insects on the wing or fish in motion just below the surface of the water, and find their way back to their home roost? In this remarkable book, a pioneering scientist in the areas of neurobiology and behavior explains in layperson's language just how bats can "see" with their ears.
Quoted from Amazon
"The report says that it is a 'very intuitive process.' The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing..."
Oooooooh, I see.... More intuitive than the low altitude voice warning, low fuel voice warning, radar illumination tones, missile lock tones, etc, etc, etc....
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Pprhaes I was a llttie too qciuk wtih my psaire and esuianthtam. I jsut took a bcnuh of sectennes and ran samilir scnramblig prescesos oevr tehm, and smoe wree qutie unrdalbeae. I tnihk taht, prhapes, the oraginil scnetnee was clferauly curtsnocted to be screlambd, yet esay to raed, in oerdr to spaerd the meme. Pahreps?
bite my glorious golden ass.
I remember seeing a show on TLC that featured a blind mechanic for a racing team. He would listen to the engine and find problems that were impossible to detect visually. Interesting stuff.
Adam
hilarious
This is nothing new. Most of the techniques, talked about, have been used with RADAR for decades. The thing that bats do, is interpret the sonic wavefront. This is accomplished by the structure of the head and ears. They produce subtle phase shifting depending on the direction the waves are coming from. Humans do this also, but not nearly to the degree that bats do it. Its the bats need to manipulate wavefronts that has caused the evolution of the many spectacular head shapes. If a model of one of the simpler bats ( i.e. not a Mexican Freetail) is made that duplicates the affect that a bat has on its call, and place microphones were the eardrums are, a human would still need a lot of training to learn how to interpret the signals. Bats probably have a hardware solution to do some of this interpratation ( just like humans have a partialy hardware solution to the problem of parsing speach phonems). The only cool "bat" thing, the artical talks about, is the dynamic nature of the sound generation. Bats are in effect using sound like hands, to feel. But this is not unique to bats. The gymnatoid eels do something simular with electric signals. They also use the chirp modulation thing. I noticed that the artical does have a link to Waters website. I guess that counters some of the lameness.
Actually one of my relatives (who was blinded while blasting tree stumps) was noted for using echolocation. He did all of the daily chores at his farm by snapping his fingers as he walked to locate the different structures, door openings etc. It was rather amazing to watch as he didn't have any problem "seeing" if things had been moved around, or someone had parked a truck in his way.
Somewhere here I have a full page story about him that was in the St. Louis Post Dispatch back about 20 years ago. If I find it, I'll post some of the commentary...
Carthago delenda est!
I kill (and even headshot) people through boxes, doors, etc. in Counterstrike all the time, just by listening to them move around. Naturally I get accused of wallhacking.. it looks the same (and technically, probably is - CS doesn't seem to take walls into accound with audio).
I can follow the guy through the wall using sound, and open fire just before he emerges from the arch.. I don't need to see him appear, I know he will be there, so I fire regardless and get the kill before he can react.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I wrtoe a llitte sprcit in PHP taht dtaemrntesos tihs bivaoher. Cehck it out. I tnhik it's ptetry cool.
(Of crouse, scroue cdoe is mdae aivllabae uednr the GPL.)
Glider pilots have been doing this for years - The electronic variometers (indication of going up or down / lift vs sink) have a short audio tone indicating relative rates of sink or lift. (higher lift is indicated by an increase of the pitch as well as a decrease of the period between beeps.)
It is very useful for keeping track of lift (allowing us to stay in thermals or atmospheric "wave") whilst still keeping a good lookout for other aircraft or special formations such as "Cumuli Granatus" - (clouds with a mountain embedded in them - for people currently with puzzled expressions.)
You would wear a walkman in the car if you wanted to get the best stereo experience, and, to avoid the sounds of things like sirens and other cars!
This is my sig.
...well, for sports at any rate.
Now, first things first, I'm not totally blind but I am legally blind. I have Achromatopsia, so I don't see a whole heck of a lot outside yet I can still play soccer, baseball, basketball (especially), Disc Golf and Ultimate Frisbee because I can hear what's going on around me at all times. I don't have to see where my disc lands I listen for the "thunk", with soccer and baseball there have been "beeper" balls for a long time and in basketball there are always sounds to let you know where the ball is (dribbling, passing, team mates, etc).
Now, this technology couldn't be used en masse as another post pointed out because there would be too much interferance from others and using headphones would block out other important sounds like traffic and other pedestrians.
Anywho, my $0.02
crazy dynamite monkey
SF writer Arthur Clarke wrote an essay about the senses humans have and don't have. He reported seeing a blind man referee a table tennis game, successfully. Clarke also mention playing table tennis under a tin roof once. When it started raining, his game collapsed.
Apparently we're better than we know at pinpointing sharp sounds in the environment.
There were a series of article written back in the early 80's in Sport Aviation, the house organ of the Experimental Aviation Association, about a radar system for light planes that worked in a similar way. The guy had built extremely cheap, short range (two miles, say) radars out of coffee cans. He mounted two of them in an airplane, pointed 45 degrees to the left and right of the centerline, and rigged stereo headphones to them. The idea would be that you could hear other traffic in the air, and then locate them with your eyes to see and avoid them.
It's surprisingly hard to pick up light planes visually, they are tiny specks right up until the time that they fill the windshield. The response of the FAA has been the TCAS systems -- which are extremely complex and eyewateringly expensive (about $1M per system) This makes sense for jetliners, but is out of the question for light planes.
As near as I can tell, nobody did anything with the BINCAS system after the articles came out. It was a cool idea, though.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I know that in the realm of video gaming, its fairly commonplace to build up a map of where players are based on sound alone. Combining information from the sound of footsteps, and items being picked up, with my knowledge of a map allows me to know exactly where multiple people are. This seems to be very similar to what a bat does to track its prey.
If I were flying in a cockpit, and had perhaps a 4 speaker (or maybe more for up/down differentiation) system placed around my head, I'd feel confident in being able to mentally place many airplanes in 3D space. Perhaps different sounds for different types of airplanes, as well as friend or foe would allow even more information to be encoded. This sort of mental placement based on sound is second nature to those of us who have grown up playing firt person shooters (FPS).
It seems even Google understands it, because the search results started with: "Do you mean: According research".
Now it appears the catch-line for human echolocation is "Can you see me now?"
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
So we don't need eyes for seeing anymore, freeing them up to be used for their other many useful functions.
As a kid I told my mom that I could hear the radiation comming from the a television with the sound turned off. She said she couldn't hear anything and looked at me as if I found more mushrooms in the yard.
I'm glad someone else can here the whine of a tv.
We've known this for many years now. How else are you supposed to get through the glass maze and retrieve the Swanzp scroll?
memorize fweep
fweep me
Is not only the right way to get bat-like senses, it's the only one!
MARCO!!!
Hmmm...
I remember one program in my Amiga more than a decade ago. It could pinpoint an object on flat desk if it could get sound data from two microphones situated somewhere in space above the desk. The object itself could be either "clicking teeth" type or then it could truely be a critter crawling on the tabletop.
Of cource that program could do much more than that, but it had a prerecorded neural network macro for such analysis, and it worked! (It gave the data as distances in mm/cm/m from the two microphones, which understandably still leaves two possible places, but adding a third was too tedious for me then).
news for nerds stuff that matters!
bite my glorious golden ass.
I noticed whilst sitting in front of a medium sized waterfall(white noise but prettier, calico noise) with my eyes shut I could hear accurately sense people passing me by from left to right or vis-a-vis because they caused a spatial interferance to the sound. Doing this was very relaxing indeed and may be a way of honing our brain-aural system.
between the slash and the dot
bats..humans..echolocation... *thinking* sell it to Microsoft to locate bugs in windows ?
....Excuse me, but
To test the product, you would hear "Can you hear me now? Good. Can you hear me now? Good....."
mod taht up :)
I once saw a documentary on TV about some traveller and adventurist (I can't remember his name) who told that he once met some highlander who used the very same technique to orient in the snowstorms.
People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a 'virtual insect'
I bet these people wonder how they can tell from which direction sounds comes from when someone is talking to them. Seriously, replace "virtual insect" with "other guy on the enemy team in ravenshield" and these people are found to be completly clueless.
Hell, even the part about fighter piolets using more than their eyes is rather old; I'm in a tribes2 clan and I remember awhile back we had installed a soundpack that modified the Beowulf tank to play the lowrider music instead of the jet music and the shrike scout antigrav plane to play something else so that you could hear from what direction they are coming from 5 or 6 seconds before they came so you could dodge them. I also remember a bug when I installed my audigy that when you shot anything, you'd get to hear whatever that thing is as it traveled. So, for example, as a missle traveled it'd sound as if I was riding on the missle; I could hear the sound bouncing off of objects and I could tell "oh, the missle just went a little left of a building" or "oh, the missle just changed course and went for a flare" without needing to see it. I could also judge how close one of my pot-shots with the disk launcher came by how the frequency of the soundwaves generated by the disk itself. Of course, I had to turn it off; when you hear every single shot within the area you're getting info, as well as vehicles, generators, turrets, etc things get confusing and you can't tell what's going on anymore. You can also use touch to the same degree.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The basic problem is that the pinna (outer ear) is largely what's responsible for refining the spatial information that an incoming sound provides. Sure, there are some simple cues embedded in the sound -- basically a sound shadow created by the head for high frequency sound, simple intensity falloff, and the interval between sound arriving at each ear -- but these only apply to isolating sounds laterally. Vertical information is almost entirely dependent on the frequency transforms created by your pinnae. And everyone's pinnae are unique.
I remember a demonstration a professor gave on this in school: he sat a classmate down and blindfolded him, then snapped his fingers at various spaces around the subject's head, and asked him to point to where the sound came from. Predictably, he did pretty well. Then the prof took some silly putty and stretched it over the student's ears, with holes made for the entrance to the ear canal. Laterally, the student performed about as well after this handicap was introduced, but his ability to resolve targets vertically was pretty lousy.
So, if you wanted to use this technology to help pilots track planes around them -- an application the article hints at -- you would have to have a processor constantly apply a frequency transform to the sound. That's not a huge problem, but the way you get that frequency transform is: stick a tiny mix in the ear canal and shoot a variety of sounds at the subject.
Short of some significant advances in computationally modeling the freq. xforms from 3d scans of the pinna (or temporarily cutting off the subjects' ears) this is the only way to get a spatially rich signal from an artificial source (with stereo outputs -- I'm assuming this has to be doable with headphones to be considered practical). Might make sense to go to all this trouble for fighter pilots I suppose, but we will probably not see any relevant tech in consumer gear for quite a while.
Anyway, take speed of sound at sea level (340.29 m/s according to google), do some simple math and you get an optimum resolution of about 0.85 cm. That's not really that great, and when you use a more realistic sound range you get results closer to 2.1 cm.
Obviously this would still be a great development for blind folks, but these numbers are just theoretical. The sad truth is that we just don't have the hardware between out ears to do true echolocation. We can localize sound sources, but the parts of our brain responsible for hearing do not tie that closely into our sense of spatial awareness.
So yeah, you might be able to roughly track one or two things in space, but calling it echolocation is a big stretch.
Sure! I used to use it all the time but now I have Slashdot for finding virgins.
Vlad T. Impaler
Count of Dracula.
All things in moderation; including moderation
What happened to all the Dare Devil posts? I thought this was a geek page, come on guys.
I'm wrong and so are you.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
this remineds me of a time i played BF 1942. My roomates were asleep so i had to use the head phones. ANyway a tank had cornered me behind abuilding but becouse of the stereop efects of the head phones i could pinpoint the tanks possition easy and as ablre to get behind it..drop a charge and blow it up. It was almost to easy considering that i had never done it before. hook joshuacorning (at) johnsrealestate.net
Recording the natural echos of the room creates a sort of virtual acoustic room, and listening to it through speakers creates a second set of echos that sounds unnatural.
But if you listen to the recording with headphones, you hear only the the original set of echos and with a reasonably good recording, the sense of being placed in original room where the recording was made can be remarkable.
Right, but the point of my parent post (which I also wrote, by the way) was that we rely on the shape of words, at least in part, to decipher text as we read it. In order to demonstrate this, it doesn't matter whether the shape is approximated using boxes or Gaussian blur.
Did you follow my link? I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The words are blurred to the point where you can't make any of them out individually. However, because the phrase as a whole is so familiar--I don't know about you, but I see this slogan almost every day--and because you can still basically see the overall shape of the words, you should still be able to read it. At least one other person got it (though they got modded offtopic... go figure.)
I guess this is all offtopic, anyways...
yours
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That makes a lot of sense, but I'll bet the success of "listen with headphones" depends a lot on how the microphones were placed when the recording was made.
A long time ago, I read an article about research into this. Experiments were done using a dummy human head with microphones placed in it's ears. Subjects who listended to recordings made this way usually reported an excellent illusion of sound location, and were even able to correctly locate sounds that had come from behind the dummy head. OTOH, the same subjects reported poor localization of sounds when listening to recordings made using more conventional microphone placements.
i just reel at the echos of evil capitalistic earth killing corporate scum have indoctrinated in my soul.
On a related note, Nature Science Updated recently had this article:- 2.html
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030908/030908
"A bat-inspired sonar walking stick could help visually impaired people sense their surroundings."
"Research"? Try "current product". Neumann, the top manufacturer of microphones in the world, has the KU 100 "Dummy head", with two fake rubber 'ears' and two microphones inside. This is known as stereo 'binaural' recording technique, and, through headphones, yields absolutely incredible 360 degree localization, including vertical displacement.
However, through speakers, it doesn't sound quite right, which is why it tends to only be used for specialized things.
-T
a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks.
Too bad fighter jets as so damn noisy. And that noise level changes drastically, depending on what's happening. In a sharp 7g turn? It's a LOT noisier than flying straight and level.
I'd hate to have to rely on sensitive hearing to locate a threat.
My piano tuner could "hear" lamp-posts from the other side of the road (2ft obstacle 20-30ft away): he wasn't sure how, but it seemed likeliest that it was echolocation. He would win bets with friends about this.
Unfortunately the one time he couldn't hear lamp-posts was when they were directly ahead of him. That was something he just had to get used to.
Yeah, I followed the link.
No, I didn't get it until I read the solution.
Even now, I recognize the shape only vaguely.
If I looked at it a month or so down the road, after I forgot about it, I probably wouldn't be able to recognize it.
I still think that rectangular boxes would be esier to decipher.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana