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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You don’t. You have extra information from your eyes that it is not in the room – If you were to do a blind test with a theoretically perfect recording (no hiss/hum from the mic) and a theoretically perfect speaker that could reproduce every frequency audible to us accurately, it’s likely you could fool someone, but other sound cues such as breathing or ambient noise from just someone’s clothes could be enough to tip someone off.
I accidentally confused my roommate this way – they were in a room next to the living room, they heard a voice while I was watching TV and thought it was me talking to them. Without the extra visual context behind the sound, they couldn’t confirm immediately if it was me or the TV. Granted this anecdote is not perfect because the sound gets slightly distorted traveling through a space, but still it goes to show just how much lifting our other senses do when it comes to perceiving this world.
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