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.

Benefits

• Experiment is part of an experiment set with a total of 22 experiments about generation, propagation and perception of sound, oscillations and waves
• Particularly appropriate as an experiment for first contact with physics in general
• With graphic student worksheets
• With detailed instructor information
• Optimized for tight schedules, i.e. minimum preparation time required

Tasks

• 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
• Study how well your auditory system can identify directions
• Generate sound pulses with the software the output of which creates offset pulses to the earpieces of the headphones

Learning objectives

• Localisation of sound sources
• Directional hearing