Learning Echolocation

Navigating the world by sound — taught by a blind student, for blind learners and their families

Introduction: Daniel Kish on Echolocation

Introduction recording, about 5 and a half minutes. Listen to this first — the seven lessons unlock when you finish it.

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This is the first thing to listen to in the course. Daniel Kish is one of the most influential figures in echolocation. Blind since infancy, he became an orientation and mobility specialist in 1996 — and he is believed to be the first blind person certified in the field. He coined the term “flash sonar” in his 1995 master’s thesis, built the first documented curriculum for teaching echolocation, has worked with thousands of blind students around the world, and published a textbook on teaching echolocation and mobility in 2016.

In this recording, made for this course, Daniel traces echolocation from bats and early humans in dark caves, through its long unspoken history among blind people, to the moment it became something that could be deliberately taught. It is the background that makes everything Nathan teaches afterwards make sense.

The seven lessons unlock once you have listened to this introduction. You can pause and come back — your place is remembered on this device, and so is how much you have heard.

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Introduction audio: Daniel Kish on the history of echolocation

Your progress through the introduction

Press Play above to begin. The seven lessons unlock when you have listened to the whole introduction.

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability.

[Recording check.]

Echolocation has been around for a long, long time. Animals have been using echolocation in nature for millions, if not billions of years. Bats certainly have been using some form of echolocation for fifty million years or more. And humans have probably used echolocation for about as long as there have been humans. Certainly before the advent of artificial light — before fire was used for light, before torches — humans spent time in the dark. Humans spent time in caves, which are extremely dark, and they probably used their auditory systems as much as they used their vision in the early stages of human evolution.

Fast-forwarding a bit — echolocation as regards blind people specifically: blind people have probably echolocated for about as long as there have been blind people. There are several forms of echolocation. Passive echolocation is using sounds that are already happening in the environment, and using the reflections of those sounds from surfaces around the listener. And then there’s active echolocation, which is producing an actual signal — such as a tongue click, or some other kind of signal.

The thing is, though: although there has been echolocation in some form for as long as there have been blind people, the teaching of echolocation is a relatively recent phenomenon. In its early stages, echolocation wasn’t regarded as something that could be taught or passed on. If it was passed on at all, it was perhaps introduced by one blind person to another. There isn’t a lot of literature suggesting that echolocation was taught deliberately or systematically to blind people — whether by other blind people or by sighted professionals.

Fast-forwarding a bit more — and I entered the picture. I’m Daniel Kish. I became an orientation and mobility specialist back in 1996. I did my master’s thesis on echolocation in 1995, where I coined the term flash sonar — to highlight the idea of using a flash of sound, a pulse of sound, a click, to irradiate the environment — to sonify the environment with sound so that echoes could be elicited from it. Basically: bouncing sound off the environment.

I am probably the first to have documented a way of teaching it. I ran many blind students through a curriculum I designed, and I learned a lot about how to teach echolocation by — well — teaching echolocation. Lots of trial and error: figuring out how to teach people to click, how to teach people to listen for the reflections of that click, how to teach people to use their cane in conjunction with echolocation. The more I taught it, the more I was able to document how to teach it. After having worked with several thousand blind students, I published a textbook in 2016 on how to teach echolocation, and other forms of mobility as well.

And that brings us up to the present — [he laughs; a fly interrupts the take] — where I now travel all over the world, helping blind people learn how to use echolocation.

[End of take. Daniel and the family review the recording.]