this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Taking the opportunity to share a super fun fact about this. The ridges in a human's outer ear allow us to determine whether a sound is coming from above or below by subconsciously noting how different frequencies are bouncing off those ridges. Animals without those ridges can only determine the lateral direction a sound is coming from relative to their head's orientation, and their method of figuring out whether the sound is from above or below is to tilt their heads and "listen on a different plane"
Thanks for letting me be one of today's lucky 10,000.
This is also the reason why some audiophile-quality headphones sound more like being in a room full of speakers, rather than everything sounding like it's right next to your ears and inside your head.
Good open-back and semi-closed-back headphones can emulate the way these frequencies bounce off the ridges—or pinna—of your ear when listening to speakers, creating an accurate, realistic surround-sound effect. This is known as the Pinna-Related Transfer Function, or PRTF. If you're looking to buy a pair of headphones for gaming or movies, this is an important spec to consider.
I love now also having this knowledge, thank you
Veritasium has a video about audio illusions that talks about this! An interesting bit he brings up is how researchers put prosthetics over peoples' ears to change the shape and it caused them to temporarily lose their echo location ability. It went back to normal over the course of several days as the brain adjusted to how the new shape of the ear bounced sound.
That’s super interesting, thanks for sharing!