The fascinating world of hearing
Switch on Life is a free online learning platform with videos and interactive games about hearing loss and hearing technology. You can discover the basics about acoustics, frequency, and the anatomy of the hearing process in an entertaining and exciting way. We also introduce you to the fascinating world of hearing and the technology of hearing implants. The content is in plain English.
Switch on Life consists of eight different chapters with numerous interactive activities, which we will show you one by one over the next few months. All content is based on science.
Today you will learn how accurately you can determine the direction of a sound source with only one hearing ear.
Chapter 2
Left or right?
Recognizing the source and direction of sound
In the game “Spatial Hearing”, you can test for yourself how well you can localize sound with one or two ears. To do this, we take you to a professional audio lab. This experiment clearly shows that you can determine the source of the sound only with two ears. Our brain is even capable of calculating the distance!
Our brain can evaluate acoustic information about the sound direction and distance of a sound source only with two hearing ears. Sound waves arriving from the left reach the left ear earlier than the right. At the same time, the sound is louder at the left ear than at the right, because the head casts an acoustic shadow. Due to a minimal time difference and the volume differences between left and right, our brain is able to determine the angle at which the sound arrives at the ears. Directional hearing is impaired when the ability to locate the sound source is impaired due to hearing loss in one ear.
People with profound hearing loss fitted with two hearing implants therefore benefit from improved spatial hearing, better sound localization and easier speech understanding, even with multiple speakers at the same time.
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