[high_priest]

I have played alot of videogames & at some point identified, how can I guess, the source of sounds. Guess, because it's nowhere near actual approximation. Most often, source is guessed by context. E.g. The door knocking sound illusion, which was used to troll streamers.

Then you have directional localisation based on delay between ears, difference in volume & properties of reverberations. Things to the sides are going to arrive in either ear at different moment. Add source if first echo & you have confirmation that a sound is coming from either right or left. The more directly to the side is the sound, the bigger the delay between ears is, so you get approximate angle.

Now we consider sound muffling, caused by shape of our head & ears. Things in front are going to sound clearer in the opposite ear, than sounds from the back.

The same principle is used for detection of height. Things below are going to get muffled, things above will be clearer. In reality, feeling sounds with the whole body helps in source localisation, which can't be emulated with headphones.

[sandworm101]

Ive seen a BBC doc that tested this. They had people use putty to change the shape of thier ears, resulting in an inability to judge the height of a sound. Given how differently-shaped ears are, as opposed to the inner structures which are virtually identical, this result points towards a learned skill rather than something genetic. We each must learn how our paticular ear shapes modify sound.

[dnh44]

I once lived in a shared 4 story house and I always intuitively knew where everyone in the house was, even if they weren't being loud. You could just tell where everyone was based on how the house creaked in response to footsteps. We had someone new move in once who walked very quietly and it made me feel slightly uneasy because they were sort of invisible to my hearing.