• Dabundis@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    To expand a little bit - the ridges of your outer ear will attenuate certain frequencies of sound more than others depending on the height of the source relative to your head. Animals that don’t have these outer ear ridges can still find the source of a sound laterally since they have two ears, and tilting their head tilts the plane of their ears letting them get some vertical sound perception.

    In the smarter every day vid on this topic, they had a blindfolded person point to the source of a sound (succeeded no problem), and then packed clay into the outer ear ridges to mess with that sound attenuation. The person was able to keep their lateral sound perception but the vertical was all over the place.