Lesson 3: Listening to Objects
This lesson is locked
The lessons open up once you have listened to the course introduction, Introduction: Daniel Kish on Echolocation. It is about five and a half minutes long, and it explains what echolocation is and where it came from — everything in this lesson builds on it.
About this lesson
This is ear training. Nathan holds three objects in front of his face — a deep metal bowl, a shallow metal bowl, and a flat plate — and makes sound into each one. Your job is to hear how differently they answer. He also moves the plate toward and away from his face so you can practice hearing motion, then takes you into parks and schoolyards to hear echoes at full scale.
This lesson rewards repetition. Nathan says it directly: rewind, listen again, and give your ears time to adjust. What sounds like nothing on the first pass becomes obvious on the third.
Listen for
- The deep bowl: a hollow, boomy answer that seems to wrap around the sound.
- The shallow bowl: metallic like the first, but thinner and quicker.
- The flat plate: a pressure, “in-your-face” feeling rather than a hollow.
- The moment the plate moves closer and farther — can you track it with your eyes closed?
- In the outdoor clips: the slow echo of stick claps returning from buildings far away.
Extra practice clip: bowl sounds up close
A short raw clip of the bowl demonstration, straight from the recorder — good for repeated listening.
Try it yourself
- Go to your kitchen and collect a deep bowl, a shallow bowl, and a plate. Hold each one in front of your face and talk or click into it. Swap between them and learn each one’s “voice.”
- Have a family member hold the plate in front of you and slowly move it closer and farther while you talk. Say “closer” or “farther” as you hear it. Then trade places — this is a great two-person game.
- Step outside onto a porch or driveway, bang two sticks together, and listen for the sound after the sound you make. Echoes from far buildings arrive late — they should feel distinct in your ears.
Transcript
Lightly edited for readability. Sound demonstrations are marked in brackets.
[Recording check.]
Hello — this is a lesson on listening. The purpose of listening is so that you’re able to find objects around you, and probably identify what they sound like. I have a few objects in front of me that I’m going to use to find out what they sound like. I’m not going to tell you what they are yet, but you can probably figure it out as I start to make sound into them.
[Nathan makes sound into the first object… the second… the third.]
Try rewinding a couple of times and see if you can hear the objects and the differences between them.
The first one is a big bowl with a very deep shape. I held it right in front of my face and made a sound into it. This bowl is one of the deeper ones you’ll find, and it’s made out of metal, so you can really hear it. The second one was a smaller bowl — also metal, so you can hear it, but it’s very shallow, and you can probably hear that shallowness in the example. The last one was a plate — a very flat plate that I put right in front of me. This one gives more of an in-your-face feeling. I moved it back and forth from my face to see if you could feel it going back and forth. If you couldn’t hear that, rewind and listen again.
Now I want to see if you can hear the object moving. I’m going to take the flat plate, put it in front of my face — if you’re watching this as a video, close your eyes — and see if you can tell when the plate is moving. [He demonstrates.] Did you hear it? Let’s try it again. [He demonstrates again.]
Now that we’ve heard those, let’s hear some sounds in different environments — sounds you might hear walking around your neighborhood. [Outdoor clips play: stick claps in open space.] Try going outside and making some sound of your own. Maybe just step out onto the porch, bang a pair of sticks together, and see what sounds you hear. Focus on the sound after the sound you make. You can rewind to the clips of me banging the sticks together and listen for the echoes coming back from the buildings very far away. It may take a while for the clicks to come back, but it should be very distinctive in your ears. It helps to have headphones on, because this is recorded with technology that goes right into your ears. And if you can’t hear the echoes clearly at first, keep rewinding and listening — your ears need time to adjust to a different way of listening.
Now let’s listen to some sounds that are closer to you — these will be much faster. [Closer-range clips play.] As you can hear, there are different things to hear in all kinds of places. The first clips were recorded at a park; the second clips were recorded at a school. Maybe you could go to your school and make these sounds. There are sounds all around us, and you can use them to help you navigate.
Listening helps you understand what different things sound like. When sighted people walk around, they’re finding out what things look like. As a blind person, you can use your ears to find out what things sound like. The bowls — one has a very deep surface, one is very shallow, one is flat — those are all different, and the materials are slightly different too. Try this with some bowls in your kitchen and see if they make different sounds from each other. Then you can use the same skill to find things in real life — like the opening of a door, which we’ll get to in a later lesson, or an object you’re passing. Those are the things you’ll listen for and find as a blind person, using your ears to navigate through buildings, and especially outside. All right — that’s it.