Why does sound sometimes seemingly come from a different direction than from the source itself, especially while outside?
In: Other
I’m at least some cases it’s because the sound waves are bouncing off something and you’re hearing the reflection.
Experienced outdoorsman here.
It has to do with the conflicts between the design of our ears and the nature and physics around us.
First, our ears.
Touch your ear and you’ll feel scallops and swirls. These are elements of our ear’s design that safely keep it close to our head while giving us a sense (hah, pun intended!) of where sound might be coming from. Our brain processes this input because it’s important to our ancestors’ survival, because something crashing through the woods or a cry for help might be important. So if you’re in the middle of a flat field, being able to recognize an inbound sound’s direction helps you SPOT where that sound is coming from and see if it’s something that might keep you alive if you either approached it or avoided it, and then you could have kids, and they could have kids and they could h… and so on. Continuing the species.
But this gets borked by local physics in the same way waves on top of an ocean get weird and sometimes unpredictable. White sound, like a wind through tree leaves, can mask and obscure sound. A cliff wall can bounce sound in an echo. A bunch of pine trees or a mossy slope can deaden and absorb it. Local patterns of wind in certain areas can really muffle what you’d expect to be clear. Atmospheric layers can bounce it. Snow in particular is a giant insulator AND a giant sound-absorber, and so is fog. Water’s surfaces bounce it all over the place. Even colder versus warmer air can change sound.
All of these things counteract the ability of our ears to properly focus on sound. They overwhelm our ear’s design and our brain’s interpretation and make us look elsewhere for the source of it.
I’ve heard people having a conversation two miles away on a lake. I sometimes can’t find my wife 100 feet away in the woods when she’s screaming about a bear or something.
Nature’s freaky and it’s excellent to be alive. 🙂
For jets, if a plane is flying about 6 miles up, it takes 30 seconds for the sound to reach you. So the sound you hear is coming from where the jet was 30 seconds ago.
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Your brain can use subtle differences in timing and sound between your left and right ear to position sound in way that is similar to how your brain uses information from two eyes to understand depth. Sound can reflect off surfaces and those reflections can cause changes that confuse your brains ability to position the source of the sound.
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