A couple of weeks ago I finally had time to do something I wanted to do from such a long time, living a day completely blindfolded.
The goal of this experience is to understand how our hearing system behaves without being able to see.
I mainly wanted to understand:
- do we actually localise perfectly a sound source coming from the front?
Well, not really. there is not a clear frontal localisation. The image is quite blurred and you can get it is coming from roughly from the front. - what are the frequencies ranges in the voices that helps us to localise them the most?
I found out the low mid range of voices can give me a good perception of where the voice is coming from. Quite an interesting point. - what are the sounds that make an ambient sounds like that precise ambient?
Reverberation and early reflections
Something happened when I was at Tesco. Because of kids crying and shouting, the cashiers beeping sound, general noise (walking, chatting etc), and not having visual references made me sick quite quickly. This made me realise the power of all our senses combined together. Using just one sense will never be able to make an experience realistic and immersive enough.
I am going to do it again to explore other aspects of sound localisation. Great fun!