https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate
*
*
Trips
[aoa_logo_a]
Take your next trip with Atlas Obscura!
Our small-group adventures are inspired by our Atlas of the
world's most fascinating places, the stories behind them, and the
people who bring them to life.
Visit Adventures
Trips Highlight
Oaxaca Mexico tamales
Mexico * 7 days, 6 nights
Flavors of Oaxaca: Markets, Mezcal & Home-Cooked Meals
from $3,990 USD
Iceland - Northern Lights Aurora Borealis
Iceland * 8 days, 7 nights
Iceland in Winter: Northern Lights & Geothermal Marvels
from $4,980 USD
View all trips
*
Experiences
Upcoming Experiences
View All Experiences >>
[blank-f2c3]
Members only
Accidental Discoveries
[blank-f2c3]
Members only
Monster of the Month w/ Colin Dickey: Frankenstein
[blank-f2c3]
Members only
Antiques and Their Afterlives: Holiday Gift Guide
*
Courses
Upcoming Courses
View All Courses >>
[blank-f2c3]
Bee-licious: Taste Honey Like a Sommelier With C. Marina Marchese
[blank-f2c3]
Designing Soft Circuits & E-Textiles With Linh My Truong
[blank-f2c3]
Tree Communication With Annie Novak
[blank-f2c3]
The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party With Jen
Monroe
[blank-f2c3]
Writing the Food Memoir: A Workshop With Gina Rae La Cerva
*
Places
+ Top Destinations
+ Latest Places
+ Most Popular Places
+ Random Place
+ Lists
+ Itineraries
+ -------------------------------------------------------------
Add a Place
-------------------------------------------------------------
+ Download the App
Latest Places
View All Places >>
Submarine piers at Dora I
Trondheim, Norway
Dora I
63.4388, 10.4206
The artwork is inspired both by classic horror and modern cinema.
Beaver Dam, Wisconsin
Bones in Jars
43.4559, -88.8379
Spencer the Marathon Dog statue
Ashland, Massachusetts
Spencer the Marathon Dog Statue
42.2456, -71.4761
[blank-f2c3]
Cape Town, South Africa
Scratch Patch
-34.1716, 18.4263
Top Destinations
View All Destinations >>
Countries
+ Australia
+ Canada
+ China
+ France
+ Germany
+ India
+ Italy
+ Japan
Cities
+ Amsterdam
+ Barcelona
+ Beijing
+ Berlin
+ Boston
+ Budapest
+ Chicago
+ London
+ Los Angeles
+ Mexico City
+ Montreal
+ Moscow
+ New Orleans
+ New York City
+ Paris
+ Philadelphia
+ Rome
+ San Francisco
+ Seattle
+ Stockholm
+ Tokyo
+ Toronto
+ Vienna
+ Washington, D.C.
*
Foods
Latest Places to Eat & Drink
View All Places to Eat >>
Introducing one of the only train station lobsters that won't
leave you filled with regret
Grand Brasserie
A simple box of soba noodles with aburaage (fried tofu), the
foxes' favorite food.
Inari Soba Mansei
[blank-f2c3]
Chef Boyardee Statue
Cevapcici at Sarajevo '84
Sarajevo '84
In this salad, rice gets topped with pinches of toasted coconut,
dried fish, finely-sliced herbs and vegetables, bean sprouts, a
tiny knot of noodles, crushed black pepper and dried chili.
Thai-Islam Phochana
*
Stories
+ Recent Stories
+ All Stories
+ Puzzles
+ Video
+ Podcast
Most Recent Stories
View All Stories >>
Bear 409, "Beadnose," a sow that won Fat Bear Week in 2018. GIS
specialist Joel Cusick is pioneering a new technique for
calculating the bears' weight that doesn't disrupt their normal
activity.
Fat Bears and 5 Other Stories of Preparing for Winter
Accusations around sex and race have caused controversy and
change at a major LARP community.
Racism and Sexism Claims Shake a Modern Fantasy Village
<em>T'anta wawa</em>, or 'baby bread,' is baked in Bolivia, Peru,
Colombia, Argentina, and Ecuador in honor of those who have
passed away.
Bake 'Baby Bread' as a Celebration of Life and Death
Get out of town to find transformative connections around the
world.
Find Your Escape With Atlas Obscura's Best Places to Travel in
2025
* Newsletters
* Sign In Join
*
Explore Newsletters
*
Sign In
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Join
*
Places near me Random place
Teach Yourself to Echolocate
A beginner's guide to navigating with sound.
by Jessica Leigh Hester October 11, 2018
Teach Yourself to Echolocate
Copy Link Facebook Twitter Reddit Flipboard Pocket
Sounds bounce off surfaces--and you can practice listening to them.
Sounds bounce off surfaces--and you can practice listening to them.
All Illustrations: Kristen Boydstun
[YmFkZ2UucG]
Wonder From Home
See More
Daniel Kish navigates the world like a bat does--and he does so
without ever leaving the ground.
After losing his vision as an infant, Kish taught himself to move
around with the help of echolocation. Like bats, Kish uses his mouth
to produce a series of short, crisp clicking sounds, and then listens
to how those sounds bounce off the surrounding landscape. (Our winged
neighbors tend to emit these clicks at frequencies humans can't hear,
but Kish's clicks are perfectly audible to human ears.) From there,
Kish makes a mental map of his environment, considering everything
from broad contours--like walls and doors--down to textural details.
Kish now teaches echolocation, mostly to students who are blind. For
these students, Kish believes that an echolocation practice can buoy
confidence and independence. Kish's own experience is persuasive--he
famously bikes along hilly, car-lined streets--and a growing body of
scholarly research has begun to unpack exactly how expert
echolocaters do their thing. This research has also backed up the
idea that this skill is highly learnable. When researchers at the
University of California, Berkeley, asked novice echolocators to use
tongue clicks to determine which of the two objects in front of them
was larger, the newbies were soon able to do so in a way that the
scientists couldn't attribute to chance.
Whatever your sightedness, there's something to be said for learning
to listen more attentively to sonic scenery. Kish believes that
vision has a way of blunting the other senses unless people work to
really flex them. Deft echolocators, he says, are able to perceive
fine differences--distinguishing, say, between an oleander bush ("a
million sharp returns") and an evergreen ("wisps closely packed
together, which sound like a bit like a sponge or a curtain").
They're discovering sonic wonder wherever they go. We asked Kish to
tailor a lesson for first-timers just learning to listen to the
landscape.
1) Practice tuning in
Before you begin producing your own sounds, just practice noticing
the ways that sounds change around you. Try this exercise next time
you're in a car (assuming you're not in the driver's seat).
Crack open the window and close your eyes. This is a good chance to
pass through a varied landscape pretty quickly, and begin to
differentiate between sounds. "On a residential street, you should
hear the sound of the car jump in and out as you pass other parked
cars, possibly trees, posts, mailboxes, or houses near the curb,"
Kish says. "Everything we pass reflects the sound of our car
differently." Prime yourself to pay attention to incidental
soundtracks.
2) Pick your supplies
If you are a sighted person, you'll want a blindfold. "It's very,
very difficult to discern these kinds of subtleties if your eyes are
working at the same time," Kish says. Occluding one sense gives the
less-dominant ones room to stretch their legs.
Now is also a good time to stock up on what you'll need for your
practice sessions. First, you'll need a metal tray or a bowl, so make
sure you've got one on hand. Once you start moving through space
later on, it will also help to have a trekking pole or a cane, or at
least a partner you trust to shout if you wander too far off base.
For beginners, the best clicks are ones that you can make cleanly and
reliably.For beginners, the best clicks are ones that you can make
cleanly and reliably.
3) Choose an environment
Expert echolocators like Kish can get a bit fancier with their
choices, and try to hear the character of a room. Tin decor,
buttresses, or other accoutrements that might make a realtor swoon
will also give Kish reason to perk up his ears. "It will sound more
alive," he says. "It will sing to you."
For beginners, picking the right place is a bit of a Goldilocks
situation: You don't want a flat field, where there's nothing for
sound to bounce off. Then again, you ought to steer clear of spots
where your hearing will be impeded by, say, a sea of carpet.
"Probably the best is a fairly quiet, open space without a lot of
clutter, maybe a non-reverberant room," Kish says.
4) Practice your clicks
Clicks are not created equal, and some of them will work against you.
"The most commonly produced rubbish click is a 'cluck,'" Kish says. A
cluck sounds something like two clicks on top of each other, which
masks the returning sound. A good click can't be sloppy, and it must
be possible to reliably reproduce.
For beginners, Kish says that a dental click fits the bill (this is a
tsk-tsk sound, Kish says, "like you're disappointed"). Another
contender is the sound you might use to prompt a horse to giddy-up; a
"ch" sound, as in "check" or "church," is another option.
The key is finding the option that's comfortable for you. "You settle
on whatever click you can do, and stick to it," Kish says.
Tune in!Tune in!
5) Start simple
The goal with clicking is to take stock of three things. The first is
presence/absence (is something there?). Then, the location (what
direction is it in?). Finally, distance (how far away is it?).
To teach these skills, Kish often starts with this exercise: Students
pair up with a partner who holds a bowl or flat paddle somewhere
above their head. The student clicks, turns their head, and tries to
gauge where the bowl is--straight ahead, or off to the side?
Kish doesn't click all the time--only when he needs to refresh the
mental map he's working from. For beginning students, though, it's
helpful to practice the physical mechanics of clicking, in order to
learn how to listen to bouncing sounds.
6) Get moving
The next step is to do all of this while in motion. Walk along a
hallway and try to listen for differences in sounds that might
indicate corners or open doors.
At first, you'll shuffle and fumble through this exercise, and it's
bound to be frustrating. Go ahead and ask your partner whether or not
you're on the right track--but, if you're using a blindfold, keep it
on. "The temptation is very strong to pop the blindfold off and on,"
Kish says. "I resist that because there is an adaptation process that
has to happen here. You disrupt it entirely when you pull off the
blindfold. I wouldn't use vision to spot-check an experience; I would
try to avoid that."
7) Stop when you need to
Moving through the world in a new way can be both thrilling and
thoroughly disorienting. Kish has found that people who are sighted,
and are unaccustomed to not being able to rely on their vision, need
to take breaks every 30-45 minutes. His blind students, for whom
non-visual navigation is routine, can hang in longer.
Echolocation takes patience and practice. Kish cautions that it's
hard to get good at this--it took him years. But trying it out can
open your ears to the world.
Next in series
How to Turn Plants Into Tinctures, Like an Ancient Alchemist
A beginner's guide to extracting flavors from herbs and flowers.
[blank-f2c3]
serviceeveryday wonderhow toobscura academynavigationsounds
Using an ad blocker?
We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the world's
hidden wonders. Consider supporting our work by becoming a member for
as little as $5 a month.
Continue Using Ad-Block Support Us
Keep Exploring
The water is full of wonders.
beach
How to Decode the Shells You Find Washed Up on the Beach
A beginner's guide to identifying conchs, chitons, and more.
Jessica Leigh Hester May 28, 2024
Home by yourself? You may as well make friends.
insects
A Field Guide to the Miniature Menagerie Inside Your Own Home
And on your face.
Jessica Leigh Hester May 25, 2023
Low tide is the perfect time to mudlark.
archaeology
How to Scavenge for Bits of History Like London's Mudlarks
A guide to scouting for humble treasures on the shore of the Thames.
Jessica Leigh Hester January 2, 2020
If you think you've got a chondrite, you're looking for chondrules
and metal grains.
meteorites
How to Find a Meteorite
It's a long shot--but if you're keen to look, here's how to start.
Jessica Leigh Hester July 18, 2019
[ZXNfMDMuan]
Video
The Giant Megaphones Tucked Inside a Remote Estonian Forest
6:02
[LmpwZw]
Video
All Roads Lead to Texas: Sounds of the Lonestar State
0:00
Sponsored by Travel Texas
Want to see fewer ads? Become a Member.
From Around the Web
ATLAS OBSCURA BOOKS
A Visual Odyssey Through the Marvels of Life
Venture into Nature's Unseen Realms with Our New Book Atlas Obscura:
Wild Life Order Now
Gastro Obscura Book
[]
See Fewer Ads
Become an Atlas Obscura member and experience far fewer ads and no
pop-ups.
Learn More
Get Our Email Newsletter
[ ]
[ ]
Thanks for subscribing! View all newsletters >>
[Submit]
Follow Us
*
*
*
*
*
*
Get the app
Download on the Apple App Store Get it on Google Play
Download the App
Places
* All Places
* Latest Places
* Most Popular
* Places to Eat
* Random
* Nearby
* Add a Place
Editorial
* Stories
* Food & Drink
* Itineraries
* Lists
* Puzzles
* Video
* Podcast
* Newsletters
Trips
* All Trips
* Art & Culture Trips
* Food Trips
* Hidden City Trips
* History Trips
* Wildlife & Nature Trips
* FAQ
Experiences
* Experiences
* Online Courses
* Online Experience FAQ
* Online Course FAQ
Community
* Membership
* Feedback & Ideas
* Community Guidelines
* Product Blog
* Unique Gifts
* Work With Us
Company
* About
* Contact Us
* FAQ
* Advertise With Us
* Advertising Guidelines
* Privacy Policy
* Cookie Policy
* Terms of Use
(c) 2024 Atlas Obscura. All rights reserved.
Questions or Feedback? Contact Us
Thanks for sharing!
Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders.
Like us on Facebook to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders.
Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook
Wild Life Cover
Order Atlas Obscura: Wild Life Today!
Venture into nature's unseen realms with our new book Wild Life.
Explore hidden ecosystems & discover incredible species.
Order Now!
Wild Life Cover
We'd Like You to Like Us
Like Atlas Obscura and get our latest and greatest stories in your
Facebook feed.
No Thanks
[p]
Quantcast
**