Echoes

[Agent Smith]

I'll keep this short & sweet.

Why are echoes only partial as opposed to whole?

 

What I mean is if I shout "I love you", the echo is "love you" and not "I love you" which is what I actually said. The echo is truncated, the first word/two is dropped as it were.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Agent Smith

[Sensei]

1) subjective feeling

2) you are deaf

3) environment (reflected sound has too low volume toward you). eg. in an anechoic chamber, no echo can be heard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber

4) interference with previous words

Everything is an echo, your ear does not receive sound directly. The sound reverberates through it several times.

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, Agent Smith said:

I'll keep this short & sweet.

Why are echoes only partial as opposed to whole?

 

What I mean is if I shout "I love you", the echo is "love you" and not "I love you" which is what I actually said. The echo is truncated, the first word/two is dropped as it were.

As a singer, my suspicion is that it may have something to do with the vowels involved. I don't think consonants echo very effectively (complex transient waveforms, including a lot of high frequency components). So I think what you hear is mainly the vowels. The sounds that will echo the best will be the open vowel sounds, as these have the simplest waveform (closest to sinusoidal, with fewest high frequency components). The English "I" is a diphthong, consisting of AAA and EEE. The "o" of love is AAAH and the "ou" of you is OOO. AAA and OOO are open, while EEE is not. So in the case of "I", The EEE won't echo very well and the preceding AAA is very short. So you hear mainly the following longer AAA and OOO. At least, that would be my best guess.

Edited July 29, 2022 by exchemist