Why is the sound of coins dropping on the floor so recognizable, even in a noisy setting?
In: Physics
The hairs in our inner ear detect different frequencies of sounds. The higher frequencies are easier for those hairs to detect. When someone starts to have hearing loss (those hairs get crumpled from too much noise and don’t bounce back) it is usually the lower frequency noises that are lost first.
The circular shape makes it *ping.
A sharp, short noise is detectable by the human brain for survival
The biological explanation would be the intrinsic motivation while I would argue there’s also an extrinsic motivation at work. Coins and money are valuable so we would be inclined to have our attention drawn to such noise as well, opposed to say a rubber pylon falling on the floor – we wouldn’t care much and it isn’t memorable.
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