Published on Jun 05, 2023
Human beings extract a lot of information about their environment using their ears. In order to understand what information can be retrieved from sound, and how exactly it is done, we need to look at how sounds are perceived in the real world. To do so, it is useful to break the acoustics of a real world environment into three components: the sound source, the acoustic environment, and the listener.
1. The sound source: this is an object in the world that emits sound waves. Examples are anything that makes sound - cars, humans, birds, closing doors, and so on. Sound waves get created through a variety of mechanical processes. Once created, the waves usually get radiated in a certain direction. For example, a mouth radiates more sound energy in the direction that the face is pointing than to side of the face.
2. The acoustic environment: once a sound wave has been emitted, it travels through an environment where several things can happen to it: it gets absorbed by the air (the high frequency waves more so than the low ones. The absorption amount depends on factors like wind and air humidity); it can directly travel to a listener (direct path), bounce off of an object once before it reaches the listener (first order reflected path), bounce twice (second order reflected path), and so on.
Each time a sound reflects off an object, the material that the object is made of has an effect on how much each frequency component of the sound wave gets absorbed, and how much gets reflected back into the environment; sounds can also pass through objects such as water, or walls; finally, environment geometry like corners, edges, and small openings have complex effects on the physics of sound waves (refraction, scattering).
3. The listener: this is a sound-receiving object, typically a "pair of ears". The listener uses acoustic cues to interpret the sound waves that arrive at the ears, and to extract information about the sound sources and the environment.
