Based on this, the dolphin builds an image of its environment and the object. Echolocation has been studied in bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus , although there are still underlying aspects that are not entirely understood. For now, scientists see echolocation as a learning opportunity to create new communication technologies in some areas of human life.
What is known is that dolphins have the ability through echolocation to emit sounds with a frequency of kHz and humans, with excellent hearing, can hear sounds with frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Even dogs and cats that have amazing hearing capabilities do not compare to dolphins.
Dogs hear up to 45 kHz, and cats up to 65 kHz. Most of the time, dolphins will get the best results with echolocation when the object is from 16 to feet from them. Excessive noise in the environment should be upsetting for dolphins and can cause them to lose their hearing over time. It can also disorient them and disrupt their navigation systems.
Kathleen Dudzinski, Toni Frohoff. Dolphin Mysteries: Unlocking the Secrets of Communication. When a dolphin echolocates on a person, they have the ability to see muscle tissue, bone tissue, scar tissue, metal pins or rods, artificial body parts, and many subtle differences from one human to the next.
Since sound travels efficiently in water, dolphins utilize sounds via echolocation to orient themselves and survive by detecting prey. Most mammals produce sounds via vibrating vocal chords in the larynx e. Odontocete cetaceans toothed whales produce sounds from nasal passages. In murky waters, visibility may be extremely low, thus dolphins rely on echolocation rather than sight to catch prey and avoid predators.
Most odontocete cetaceans have the potential of emitting very high and low frequency sounds. These frequencies vary according to species and contexts. For example, dolphins can communicate with low-frequency signals such as chirping and whistling; however, when using echolocation they emit high-frequency sound signals.
Echolocation has been investigated for decades by research scientists to further understand the complex mechanisms of this unique ability.
However, additional work is required before we fully understand the specifics of echolocation. His purpose in posing this question is to emphasize the subjective experience of the bat as it sends out vocalizations and then reacts to the echoed sound waves as they return.
While humans are able to understand the basic physical processes of bat echolocation, the only way for us to consider what it is actually like to be a bat is through our imaginations, and even then our understanding of the true bat experience is only speculative.
Nagel emphasizes this idea: [Bat echolocation] is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.
This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion. While most humans are not able to experience echolocation directly, game designers have still attempted to represent this ability through game mechanics, visual effects, and narrative elements.
These efforts result in depictions of echolocation with varying degrees of fidelity and realism; echolocation mechanics in games have provided spatial information through musical scales, maps, and even fully realized three-dimensional worlds. This diverse set of representations may be attributed in part to the inaccessible experience of the echolocating subjects. When a game designer sets out to recreate the concept of echolocation, they are often approaching the design problem from the perspective of a sighted, non-echolocating human being, one who is attempting to understand the subjective experience of the echolocator but who has no firsthand knowledge of this ability.
The cartridge box for the game sets the scene: They appeared on Earth 49 million years before we did. They are dolphins! And now, they need your help. The longer the chase, the more frantic it becomes. A lone seagull, her only hope. And you. Are you listening? Each sound is your cue to act, to guide the dolphin in its treacherous trek, through seahorses and undercurrents, away from danger.
There is much to learn and not a moment to lose. The dolphins await, and so does—the giant squid! In this game the player controls a dolphin that is being chased by a giant squid. To safely navigate away from this enemy, the dolphin must pass through small holes in a towering wall of seahorses, shown in Figure 1. Just before each seahorse wall appears, an audio cue plays that indicates the location of an opening.
A high-frequency sound indicates a higher opening in the wall while a low-frequency sound indicates a lower opening, as demonstrated in the gameplay of Video 1.
A screenshot from Dolphin showing the wall of seahorses that the player character must navigate in order to avoid the giant squid. The five pitches that indicate the location of openings in the seahorse walls from Dolphin.
While the choice of these specific pitches may warrant further investigation, the aspect most relevant to our current discussion is the domain in which these signals are being transmitted. The subjective nature of experience promotes the diversity we see in representations of echolocation. In this article I will examine these differing depictions of echolocation in video games, specifically focusing on how game designers use echolocation mechanics to consider the subjective experiences of player characters with reduced sightedness, visual impairment, or blindness.
I will then consider the mechanical aspects of dolphin echolocation before looking at representations of this concept in video games, with a focus on the Sega Genesis title Ecco the Dolphin Finally, I will examine depictions of human echolocation and how representations of disability interact with ideas of subjective experience.
This article treats the representation of human echolocation as an extension of media depicting human blindness, helping underscore the discussion of subjective experience with its cultural implications. Depictions of both human and nonhuman echolocation attempt to bridge the gap between the hypothetical experiences of characters with reduced sightedness and the apperceptions of sighted players, but as we will see in the examples of this article, game designers often support their echolocation mechanics with narrative and supplementary information rather than actualizing the experience with realistic gameplay.
By sidestepping the responsibility of fully recreating these experiences, game designers require players to actualize the experience themselves, filling in this gap with their imaginations.
In this section I will examine how video games express and enact this explanatory gap by first detailing the philosophical foundations of the idea before considering how it affects the relationship between players and their characters. As an example of this explanatory gap, Levine considers the human perception of color, one of the more common case studies in the examination of subjectivity.
When we consider the qualitative character of our visual experiences when looking at ripe McIntosh apples, as opposed to looking at ripe cucumbers, the difference is not explained by appeal to G and R. In this sense, the physical explanation of the color red does not describe the quale of red, the unique subjective experience of red recognized by the perceiver. To extend this example a little further, consider those who experience red-green color blindness; whereas people with common trichromatic color vision would perceive red and green objects as having separate colors, those with red-green color blindness would experience some reds and some greens as being the same.
The phenomenal and linguistic associations that people with red-green color blindness make with particular colors must also differ from those with trichromatic color vision; if some reds and some greens appear to be the same color, then the words red and green and the ideas associated with them take on different meanings.
While the physical and biological differences between these two kinds of vision are well understood, the phenomenological experiences of the color-perceiving subjects, their distinct internal senses of those red and green objects, have resisted precise description.
Many philosophers have proposed ideas to bridge this explanatory gap, but they often involve incomplete solutions. The connections between these properties can then serve to outline and bridge the explanatory gap in sections. This division does not make the problems of consciousness or subjective experience any easier for Chalmers to resolve, but it does highlight two distinct problem sets in this area of research: Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the past few years, and one might think that we are making progress about consciousness untouched.
How does it integrate information? How do we produce reports on internal states? These are important questions, but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: Why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life? Sometimes this question is ignored entirely; sometimes it is put off until another day; and sometimes it is simply declared answered. But in each case, one is left with the feeling that the central problem remains as puzzling as ever.
Taking control of these objects requires not only a sense of imagination but an ability and willingness to suspend disbelief. This is all the more important when the player character has no correlate for the experience beyond the constructed narrative. This empathetic connection and the sense of player authority over game decisions enhance one another, even in situations where the subjective experience is irrational.
Empathy and imagination are integral to the designing and playing of video games, especially those games in which a player controls a dissimilar character. While video games can traverse the explanatory gap to a certain degree, they are not currently equipped to remove our own subjective experiences and replace them with those of another subject. Echolocation is often conceptualized and represented as a type of auditory sight, an ability of certain beings to create a map of their surroundings with projected and echoed sounds.
Through their infancy, sighted humans have to learn how to comprehend and respond to visual information through recognition, depth perception, spatialization, etc. Echolocation similarly engages the visual cortex but uses an elaborate auditory system detailed in the following paragraphs to achieve this effect. While both systems involve significant information processing, echolocation requires an auditory acuity that is foreign to the experience of most humans.
Employing echolocation as a game mechanic can offer an additional layer of audiovisual interaction for the player, but for those who have no direct knowledge of the echolocation experience, any contrived gameplay situation involving this ability will also require empathy and imagination by default. Because of this separation between real-world echolocation and its depiction in games, designers make sincere efforts to justify its usage as a game mechanic; they often incorporate background information or elements of lore to situate the player in the gameworld, as is the case for the Sega Genesis title Ecco the Dolphin and its sequels.
By considering the technical aspects of dolphin echolocation, the representation of this ability in the game Ecco the Dolphin , and the formative ideas that led to this gameplay mechanic, this section will demonstrate that game designers attempt to bridge the explanatory gap of dolphin experience through supplementation rather than actualization; designers reinforce the fabricated experience of echolocation in their games with narrative support and supplementary information often through marketing and manuals , not by recreating an experience precisely.
Examining the mechanical processes of sight and echolocation can highlight their unique properties. As you will see in many of the examples in this article, games often require player input for their echolocation mechanics, distinguishing this mode of play from the ability of sight by virtue of an additional interaction—there is rarely a button that you have to push to engage sight in a video game. While depictions of sight through various first-person or third-person camera perspectives are relatively commonplace and even standardized in video games and other media, echolocation has seen a multitude of representations, and rightfully so; echolocation is not a singular ability but a range of abilities used by various species with different biological mechanisms.
Concordantly, scientific definitions of echolocation open the concept up to different interpretations and methods of sonic interaction beyond those typically associated with bats and dolphins. Consider the process of hanging a heavy picture on drywall. You can rap the wall with a knuckle to determine the location of studs; hollower or more resonant sounds those that echo more indicate spaces where a nail will not be supported by additional wood framing.
Additionally, judging the distance and location of objects in this stud-finding example requires attention to timbre, different from the element of sound seemingly used by echolocating bats and dolphins, time delay.
For a direct comparison, consider the operations involved with dolphin echolocation. Dolphins determine the range and direction of objects by producing clicks that are sent out into the water and echo back to them. Conceptualizing the dolphin echolocation experience is an intricate task for humans without firsthand knowledge of biosonar. Rather than using an external sound source as in the human stud-finding process , dolphins both produce and receive auditory signals with their own biological mechanisms.
They can use this ability at ranges of more than metres to identify their preferred prey and potential predators. There is also some evidence that suggests that dolphins may be able to temporarily produce a sound that will confuse or stun small fish, making it easier for them to catch them.
Watch video clip explaining echo location. In the novel Dolphin Way , the dolphins have their own culture and language with oral histories that explain their racial memories of how they and humans went their separate ways, with radically different results. You can get the book or just download the first section for free here.
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