Certain animals, including bats, whales, and dolphins, use sound to map their environment. The creatures can emit a sound, listen to the returning echoes, and create a mental image of where they are and where to find food. This process is called “echolocation.”
All well and good, but why should you care? Because scientists are adapting echolocation technology to create virtual spaces, for acoustic design, and recreating room structures based on sound files — eventually you may even be able to use an app in your smartphone to map your environment. Fascinating stuff, and it could bring major impact to artificial reverb design, modeled spaces, and other technologies used in modern music production.
Read more at Discovery News.
