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Consider a source of sound such as a person speaking or a party of people which makes a continual drone sound of the the same frequency. If a human shakes their head side-to-side with sufficient angular speed, they are in effect obtaining different frequencies of the same sound source and should be able to apply the Doppler effect to approximately localize (from prior experience) the sound source.

Do humans use the Doppler effect to localize sources of sound and have there been any studies proving this?

Edit: A link to the Weber-Fechner law and a link to the wiki article discussing the just-noticable-difference (JND) for music applications were added to the OP for reference, based on the accepted answer.

kbakshi314
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2 Answers2

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A person would not be able to localize a sound using the Doppler effect created by shaking their head.

Say a person shakes their head at 20 cm/s. The speed of sound is about 330 m/s. This gives a frequency change of 0.06%.

The "just noticeable difference" to discern two frequencies played in succession is about 0.6% (source), so about an order of magnitude too coarse.

tom10
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Humans DO use dopler effect to estimate a sound source position, they just dont use it exactly the way you imagine.

The simplest example is the distance to a passing by object (a car, an airplane, a mosqito or even a talking human). A near flyby makes a rapidly lowering tone. An object passing away from you will change its tone slower.

Moving your head left and right gets you a direction by the phase difference between ears. Well, you can get the direction withour moving your head, but it will be exact up to the symmetry of your head.

fraxinus
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