Dr. Jennifer Groh

I think in cities, it's actually very hard to see the connection between the light, lightning and the thunder.

But I grew up in rural Vermont and it was like very obvious.

Right.

I think elephants use sound to communicate over long distances.

Yeah, I think so, or they can hear things.

I think they have sensors in their feet that can pick up these vibrations that we might call sound.

Interesting.

Interesting.

And with the elephants, I'm not sure.

I think maybe it's not sensors in the feet, but bone conduction from the feet to the ear.

And that's where it's being picked up.

So, okay, so your question was, if I can go back to your question, it was about distance and how do we know how far away a sound is coming from?

The loudness cue requires you to know something about how loud the original stimulus at the source is.

And so thunder is a wonderful example of this because we do have quite a bit of experience with thunder.

So we can kind of use how loud it is as a good cue.

And it also works great because we're talking about really long distances.

Right.

There's another pretty cool cue that you and I are probably using right now.

And that is that the sound in this room is bouncing off of all the different surfaces.

So the shortest path copy of the sound is coming straight from your mouth to my ears.