Directional hearing

Principle

The human sense of hearing is not only used to perceive sound, it even enables us to localise the direction from which we hear sound signals. On the horizontal plane of orientation (left/right, front/back) as well as on the vertical plane of orientation (top/bottom, front/back), our auditory system makes use of various physical effects. In this experiment, the students examine the directivity of human hearing. They learn that our brain analyses differences in the propagation time and sound volume between both ears. First, they perform two qualitative parts of the experiment (sound in a tube, sound through headphones) before they determine in a self-test the minimum angle at which they can assign the correct direction to the sound source.

Tasks

During this experiment, you will examine how the localisation of sound sources on the horizontal plane works. Observe how a sound source is perceived differently by both of your ears. To do so, generate a sound signal in a flexible tube and listen to the signal through both ends of the tube with both of your ears. Study how well your auditory system can identify directions. To do so, generate sound pulses with the "measure Acoustics" software. The output of these pulses to the earpieces of the headphones is offset.

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