How do we know if a sound is above, below, in front or behind of us if our ear canals are essentially just little holes in our head?
In: Biology
The pinna of your ears (the cartilage and fleshy parts of your ears on the sides of your head) have subtle influences on the sounds that you hear depending on the direction they come from. While we aren’t conscious of these differences as we hear them, our brain is able to decipher them and give us a sense of where sounds might be. This obviously isn’t fool proof, and it can sometimes be confused.
Its especially easy to fool by messing with the shape of the pinna. I watched a video where an experiment was done where they put a bunch of play dough in a person’s ear pinna but not blocking the ear canal, and did a test where they made sounds around them and to see if they could point to where the sound was coming from. Without the disruption, he was pretty good at localizing it. But, with the playdough, while he could still localize between left and right, he was often wrong about front/back, and high/low.
[https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=195](https://youtu.be/Oai7HUqncAA?t=195)
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