Are there situations in science or industry when the auditory sense is the preferred over the visual sense for making certain measurements or analyzing signals for qualitative or quantitative differences (outside of the obvious occupations, e.g. sound engineers)?
I guess what I have in mind is something like an electrical engineer who might listen to a signal to detect something that would be more difficult to detect by visually inspecting a oscilloscope or via Fourier analysis, or because its cheaper or quicker than these methods.
Granted, Fourier analysis is so ubiquitous nowadays its probably preferred in all such situations i’m envisioning, but I would also be interested to hear about situations in the past where using the ear was necessary because of the lack of advanced signal processing tools.
We could tell by hearing what freight carrier was coming 5 minutes before they arrived in the parking lot. It was useful. We couldn’t have done that with a video camera on traffic on all surrounding roads.
In the wild listening will find you animals you don’t see.
Totally different kind of answer but … I make video tutorials at work, and for a while I did the video part first and posted them online, then went through and narrated them later.
In the survey results, people would often complain about the non-narrated ones. They felt they needed the audio component, despite the fact that I’m only reading the words that are on the screen. If the screen said, “Click Start, and then Run,” my voice would say, “Click Start, and then Run.” But without hearing the words read out loud it while seeing the very same words printed next to a screenshot (or video of the action), they claimed to be incapable of learning it.
Some of them would say that they had to watch the video several times because it did not have the narration. Other people would say that the tutorial was useless without the narration because they can’t learn from it that way.
I’m sure that there are other people who didn’t even notice (no sound card or sound turned off) or don’t care, but they aren’t leaving comments, obviously.
So, this is a situation where some people prefer sound in addition to visual - while learning.
In vivo neuron recordings: you plug your electrode to an amplifier and then to a loud speaker (in addition to the computer, of course). When the electrode is close to an active neuron, you will hear a typical ‘crrrrrrr’. This is how you get the electrode close to the neuron in the first place, and also how you get a first idea of how your neron reacts to various stimuli.
Mechanics will often listen to an engine to diagnose a problem. I have heard of using the tube from a roll of paper towels as an ear trumpet to localize a troubling sound.
I used to bite a wrench and press it against pump casings when I was in the navy to listen for wear. Direct bone contact conducts sound really well, and you can hear whats going on inside with admirable clarity.
I also got to know the engine room so well I could feel/hear a pump go offline even though there was so much noise I couldn’t pick out the individual pump, and be on my way to fix the problem before the low flow alarm went off(which, btw, you WILL hear. >_< )
Operators all sorts of machinery use audible cues constantly, consciously or subconsciously… sometimes you just have a feeling something is wrong but don’t know what it is. You get so used to the way things are supposed to sound that even a minor change signals alarms in your head, while looking at the gauges gave no indication at all.
It’s just the spikes (aka action potentials). An electrode near a neuron will pick up an jump in the voltage each time a spike occurs which will be heard as a ‘tac’. An active neuron will typically fire around 30-100 Hz. At this rate, spikes will merge into a ‘crrrr’ sound. This will be superposed to some electrical noise which sounds like radio static.
I found some (old) sound files here. The third one illustrates nicely what I just described.
Flying airplanes, even big jets, relies a lot on sound. You sure couldn’t do it with your eyes closed, but you do gain a lot of useful info with your ears.
Any change in power produces a change in engine noise & any change in speed produces a change in wind noise. Those two together give you what amounts to a speed rate-of-change predictor, which is two derivitives ahead of the airspeed indicator on the instrument panel. Big airplanes have lots of inertia, as well as very laggy engines. Tight speed control is a lot easier when you include the sound info.
In smaller & older airplanes there are lots of ancillary noises which you expect to hear, or not hear, at various times throughout the flight. Pumps, valves, etc.
And as Jamicat says:
Doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in; if it makes noise, you’ll learn to recognize the good & the bad. Hell, even desktop PCs have unhappy noises despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of what they do is soundless.
