For example, how do our ears easily discern that someone talking in a room is actually there vs the dialogue coming from a television is not physically there?
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There are some other considerations too. People are mostly talking about televisions, but telephones/announcements/hi fi systems/cinemas are in our life too, all with distinctive qualities. That’s part of the answer, too – think about the difference between hearing a voicemail from your sister on speakerphone, vs playing a video you took on your phone of your sister speaking. Same equipment and even the same speaker, right? But over a lifetime of living in the world, you have an understanding of what different audio means based on lots of training about frequencies, ambient sound, echo/reverb, etc.
Another thing that hasn’t come up yet is echo and directionality. Humans aren’t like bats but we still have directional hearing. The sound wave of speech is easiest to pick up on the direct route from mouth to ear, but that’s still affected by our environment. We subconsciously pick up details from how the sound wave is three dimensional. Even the best speaker in the world can only blast sound from one direction, and while that bounces off the room too, we gather information about what data is present/missing as it does that. Wait a minute, those people are speaking in a studio and the reverb was stripped out, then the engineered/packaged/detectably artificial noise bounced around my familiar living room – well, that just doesn’t sound the same as a voice with its natural reverb preserved bouncing around the same room. Also, all of the noise is coming from the same place and then echoing from that point, while if I was really outside a coffee shop full of people chatting with a protagonist’s speech being addressed to me, some sounds would be happening around/behind me, plus the open air would make sounds different, and this is clearly bouncing off walls.
We pick up a lot more than we know. But we can still be fooled, of course.
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