Around 3-4 weekends. Althought being actively interested in your surrounding sounds is somewhat a big part of it and that happened between more intense sessions. I found that having and considering edge cases that are just in the limit of your perception is the most developing. I used a walk-in closet to familirise myself with the direct voice in contrast to the echo. Empty rooms are actually noisy. The drop in volume is significant enough that there is a clear difference in effort to produce equal sound even in mono mode. I also tried to have a reference sound I can produce uniformly in a variety of places and isn’t disrupting to other people. One was base of my tongue against my palate. However this is a little confusing as the head internal accustics are not the most straigthforward ones and interfere with the external accoustics. I also had a button I would click into place and out of. This had trouble in that it often would have insignificant volume to get a proper feel for environment.
One most not forget about just being curious about sounds that just happen to be in the environment. Emergency vechicles are a great source of doppler and the volume output is really great. In urban areas there are plenty of clear surfaces and surface gaps making the moment have a nice variable microstructure. In more wide open spaces the scale of things makes it more easy to pick up on the echo components. Cars in general provide a pretty monotome moving sound source. Riding a bike also provides a constant mechanical noice that has relative position to you fixed and doesn’t really tire you out in generating (+ is socially acceptable way of being noizy (you can even get away with devices explictly designed to generate noise (atleast if you are young enough))). I didn’t really use it myself but cell phone button/ui noises should be pretty standard, narrow and somewhat acceptable.
In private areas clapping has pretty narrow sound profile althought is pretty directional that can make the volume non-standard when you haven’t masterd that yet. Listening to the wall of a detached house with clapping could be done within it’s yard. The smaller scale you are the higher you want the pitch to be (or can only latch into higher components).
The main thing is to be aware and ready to percieve. It’s clearly a very learnable skill the main obstacle being paying that attention. I didn’t use any reference or readymade learning materials. Having a goal was plenty in providing steps/structure to proceed (ie thinking that there are possibly harder and easier sounds, you focus on what could determine the easiness/hardness of a sound, having a bunch of hearing experiences focusing on what kinds of categories you can place them in can then be used to anticipate categorising novel experinces etc). You have ears, use them, play with them. Shockingly most people really don’t. I have yet to generalise what other things could be achieved with “seriously playing”. Being able to take into account findings “midflight” might be a critical thing that most learning alternatives lack. You won’t need that many repetitions but you need to be level-appropriate (even as that level shifts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation mentions some training courses, and checking pages on them, they don’t talk about units of years or months, but short ‘workshops’, which usually means that they won’t last more than 3-4 days. So with intense training, it may be learnable quickly.
How long did it take to build this skill, and how did you do it?
Around 3-4 weekends. Althought being actively interested in your surrounding sounds is somewhat a big part of it and that happened between more intense sessions. I found that having and considering edge cases that are just in the limit of your perception is the most developing. I used a walk-in closet to familirise myself with the direct voice in contrast to the echo. Empty rooms are actually noisy. The drop in volume is significant enough that there is a clear difference in effort to produce equal sound even in mono mode. I also tried to have a reference sound I can produce uniformly in a variety of places and isn’t disrupting to other people. One was base of my tongue against my palate. However this is a little confusing as the head internal accustics are not the most straigthforward ones and interfere with the external accoustics. I also had a button I would click into place and out of. This had trouble in that it often would have insignificant volume to get a proper feel for environment.
One most not forget about just being curious about sounds that just happen to be in the environment. Emergency vechicles are a great source of doppler and the volume output is really great. In urban areas there are plenty of clear surfaces and surface gaps making the moment have a nice variable microstructure. In more wide open spaces the scale of things makes it more easy to pick up on the echo components. Cars in general provide a pretty monotome moving sound source. Riding a bike also provides a constant mechanical noice that has relative position to you fixed and doesn’t really tire you out in generating (+ is socially acceptable way of being noizy (you can even get away with devices explictly designed to generate noise (atleast if you are young enough))). I didn’t really use it myself but cell phone button/ui noises should be pretty standard, narrow and somewhat acceptable.
In private areas clapping has pretty narrow sound profile althought is pretty directional that can make the volume non-standard when you haven’t masterd that yet. Listening to the wall of a detached house with clapping could be done within it’s yard. The smaller scale you are the higher you want the pitch to be (or can only latch into higher components).
The main thing is to be aware and ready to percieve. It’s clearly a very learnable skill the main obstacle being paying that attention. I didn’t use any reference or readymade learning materials. Having a goal was plenty in providing steps/structure to proceed (ie thinking that there are possibly harder and easier sounds, you focus on what could determine the easiness/hardness of a sound, having a bunch of hearing experiences focusing on what kinds of categories you can place them in can then be used to anticipate categorising novel experinces etc). You have ears, use them, play with them. Shockingly most people really don’t. I have yet to generalise what other things could be achieved with “seriously playing”. Being able to take into account findings “midflight” might be a critical thing that most learning alternatives lack. You won’t need that many repetitions but you need to be level-appropriate (even as that level shifts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation mentions some training courses, and checking pages on them, they don’t talk about units of years or months, but short ‘workshops’, which usually means that they won’t last more than 3-4 days. So with intense training, it may be learnable quickly.