Teach yourself to echolocate (2018)

This is often used by audio mixing engineers and taught in a roundabout way at schools and studios. We think a lot about where thins “sit” in the mix. Proximity wise, and even height wise in a stereo mix. Eventually you learn how to locate things in headphones and it’s a really weird sensation when you realize you can do it. The kicker is we start out by simulating real environments in mixes, but then end up having to simulate what people expect from the medium as opposed to real life. For example something I learned doing video audio, if someone is writing something on a train, viewers expect to hear the pen on paper. But irl, there’s not a chance it’s audible. Explosions are always distorted because microphones end up clipping due to the volume, etc.

A great book on spatial simulation is The Art of Mixing by David Gibson. Older but forever relevant

That's not at all what echolocation is. What you describe is locating the source of sound using binaural hearing (similar to how we can gauge distances using stereoscopic vision).

Echolocation is finding out distance to objects (not sound sources!) by sending a sound wave in a direction, and listening for echos that bounce back. Hence echolocation.

The only sound source is you.

It's a form of active sensing: literally how a submarine sonar works (or radar, for that matter). Bats do it, too.

This has very little to do with "locating things in headphones", as that is entirely missing the active part in the first place.

Then, locating sound sources using binaural hearing is not the same as analyzing the scattered echoes when the sound source is you (relative to yourself, you know where you are already!).

It's interesting that this is currently the top comment. I wonder how many people read the article before engaging in this discussion.

> literally how a submarine sonar works

And dolphins and whales, no need to go to submarines.

Interestingly, it took until after the invention of SONAR for the theory that bats navigate by echolocation to be accepted. The theory that bats use hearing for spatial awareness was first proposed in the late 18th century, with experimental evidence, but was rejected by the scientific establishment for more than a century. People didn't know marine mammals used echolocation until the 1950s.