Perception of object length by sound

Abstract

Although hearing is classically considered a temporal sense, everyday listening suggests that subtle spatial properties constitute an important part of what people know about the world through sound. Typically neglected in psychoacoustics research, the ability to perceive the precise sizes of objects on the basis of sound was investigated during the routine event of dropping wooden dowels of different lengths onto a hard surface. In two experiments, the ordinal and metrical success of naive listeners was related to length but not to the simple acoustic variables (duration, amplitude, frequency) likely to be related to it. Additional analysis suggests the potential relevance of an object's inertia tensor in constraining perception of that object's length, analogous to the case that has been made for perceiving length by effortful touch.