Learning Echolocation

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

Lesson 1: What Is Echolocation?

Audio lesson, about 4 and a half minutes. Recorded in a quiet room, then outdoors.

About this lesson

Nathan starts the course in his room — a deliberately quiet space — then walks outside so you can hear how much the sound of a place changes. Along the way he introduces the single most important idea in the course: sighted people look at the world to learn what it looks like; you can listen to the world to learn what it sounds like.

Listen for

  • The change in the recording when Nathan steps outside — the room sounds “small,” the outdoors sounds “open.”
  • Passive echolocation: using sounds already around you — a car going by, your backpack’s wheels, people walking — to hear what’s nearby.
  • Active echolocation: making your own sound, like a tongue click, so the echoes answer your questions about the space.
  • The sound of Nathan’s voice reflecting off his house and the plants near it.

Lesson 1 audio: What Is Echolocation?

Try it yourself

After listening, stand in two different places at home — a small room like a bathroom or closet, and the most open space you have. Talk, clap, or click in each one. Notice how the same sound feels different in each space. That difference is the raw material of everything in this course.

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Recording checks and family chatter are summarized in brackets.

[Recording check. Nathan begins in his room.]

Hello everyone — this is Learning Echolocation. We’re going to be learning echolocation in these next few lessons. I’m Nathan, and I’m going to be in a couple of spaces here. Right now we’re in my room, which is the quieter space, and in a second I’ll take you outside, where most of the action will be happening.

So — what is echolocation? Echolocation is the concept of bouncing sound around your environment so that you can hear what it sounds like. You can think of it like this: people who can see are able to see the stuff around them, and they know what it looks like. We want to find out what it sounds like. And the best place to do that, I think, is to go outside.

[Nathan heads outside and stands on the grass.]

Now that we’re outside, we can hear a lot more around me. I purposely got that room quiet so we could have a better sound; out here it’s really, really open. There isn’t a lot of sound coming straight back to you — but there is still a lot of sound around here, and a lot of it is stuff you can use. That sound coming back? That’s sound off a house. And the stuff around me — back toward my house there are plants and things with different textures. Even a car going by — you can listen for that too. The stuff around you is quite important to your skills as an echolocation user, as well as you making sound.

Whenever you’re using the sounds around you to find things, that’s called passive echolocation. But whenever you make a sound — [Nathan clicks his tongue] — like that, that’s active echolocation, because you’re making a sound to make sure you find and hear what you want to hear. That’s really helpful when you want to find things from your own perspective. But it’s also important to know how to use your environment to your advantage. That way, if you’re carrying a bunch of stuff — like on your way to school — you don’t have to be tongue-clicking all the time, because you can already hear what’s around you: the wheels of your backpack, people going by, things like that. Those are all the different things we’re going to learn as we learn echolocation.