My Personal Echolocation Story

 Hi, my name is Taylor, creator of these projects at Echolocation Studio. I use active and passive, click-based and other-based forms of echolocation on a daily and regular basis. I use it as a tool to help moderate and regulate my autistic sound sensitivities and intensities by building a 3D map in my mind out of the raw echoic information in my environment and putting my acoustic focus on that information instead. I also use echolocation as a primary source of environment information when the synaesthesia I experience “clutters” my visual field too intensely in loud situations. I am self-taught through childhood and I have used it as an actively identified skill for over 20 years, I have also taught many echolocation techniques to many people throughout my life too, with students that are vision-impaired or not. I have been able to explore using echolocation in many natural and artificial environments around New Zealand, Australia and China. 

I have tried my best to write this from the language perspectives I had at the time and age. Over time with the ability of hindsight I have tried to capture my thought process at the time through various stages of my life.

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 From early childhood I came to understand that compared to my peers I was different when it came to being sensitive to sound, I was attracted to quiet environments like the school library. Growing up in rural New Zealand in the late 80’s - early 90’s with parents that had a strong “children should be seen, not heard” mentality meant I didn't grow up in small artificial spaces and had lots of time to explore the natural world in a world without much consumer technology. 

Growing up in Te Awamutu, New Zealand

 By the time I was 5, it was clear to adults in my life that I could not pay attention to anyone in loud environments and this got me dealt with a lot of verbal abuse growing up, my experiences that I had not yet learnt to describe were being misinterpreted and no matter the amount of discipline and punishments by adults in my biological family, could never get me to “behave”.

 I can recall a particular event at age 6 that I consider a kind of genesis that planted the idea in my head (it's going to sound very strange but bear with me). One evening at a mormon church event. Me and other children were instructed to play a “game” to be a demonstration example of “faith” as they claimed. The rules of the game are simple. We are, one at a time, going into one of the classrooms, where there are two missionaries with a chair in between them. We are to be blindfolded when we sit in the chair. Then the missionaries will lift the chair up and down off the ground randomly so you are disoriented enough. Now the blindfolded children are meant to use their “faith” to use confidence and get off the chair without the chair being returned to the ground yet. I of course did what was not expected of “faithful children” due to my mistrust towards adults. I was disoriented so much by the sounds they were making through the ordeal that I didn't trust them or the situation in the slightest. I climbed/crawled slowly off the chair as if it was still higher off the ground than I was tall and slowly lowered myself to the ground until I could feel it. The whole experience left me simply, very scared if not terrified. But, the lesson I took from the experience came to me very quickly, that if I am blindfolded again or cant see something. I shouldn't focus on the sounds people make, but I should focus on the echoes. This lesson I have internalised a lot throughout my life and has most definitely led to me teaching myself echolocation later in life.

 My earliest experience with using echolocation for practical reasons was around age 7 even though I didn't know what it would be called. The hometown I grew up in had a microclimate of very frequent, very thick morning fog where visibility can be lower than five meters regularly. The route to walk to school passed through areas that during this fog, there are no visual orientation references other than mown grass under you for long enough to lose your direction to walk in (think about crossing a rugby field and/or farm field diagonally through fog). I taught myself how to clap and listen for the echo of a boundary fence I was aiming for that had a pedestrian access gap along it. By age 9 after countless mornings of fog, I could begin to hear the echo consistently from 20 meters away at least and I learnt how to listen for the missing echo where the pedestrian access gap was too. (I did not understand the inherent difficulty of doing this at the time, but this particular fence was not an easy solid surface, it was a typical chain link tall fence that you can see through)

 As I grew older, panic attacks grew to be frequently triggered by loud environments, for such a young person who had no comprehension of what anxiety is, I was mislabelled as “attention seeking” when a majority of incidents were me just wanting things to be quieter.

 Up until adolescence, we were a low income family. But my parents did make the most of it with us still having the cheapest holidays growing up but for my family, these were big camping trips to places where there's at least a mountain range between us and any source of phone or electrical light let alone light pollution. And growing up in that situation meant we didn't have many batteries available for flashlights and none available for the troublemaker labelled child like myself. So quite frequently, when one needs to use the campsites toilet block in the night after all the gas lamps have turned off for the night in the campsite, it can be a much darker environment than most people realise there is on moonless and/or overcast nights. From late childhood I started to use my “echo listening” skills to be able to specifically avoid colliding with trees and other tents, able to know where solid wooden walkways over small waterways are instead of walking into water and be able to make my way through and use the toilets and return back to my sleeping bag, all without any source of light many times (Note: learning how to and having the opportunity to be sensitive enough to find your environment visually lit up by the occasional cloudless sky with only starlight and the milky way is also a equally surreal experience as much as finding your way through utter complete darkness regardless of eyesight ability).

Moving to Auckland, New Zealand

 My parents were frequent gaslighters growing up for the purpose of making me question my reality and general experience of life. Coupled with being taught at a young age the lesson that I have to be responsible for my own sense of safety, taught me many crucial critical thinking skills that I applied to my daily acoustic experience from a young age and I consider it is a major influence for me on learning echolocation.

 At age 16/17 my parents took me out of school for their own reasons and I had no choice that year but to walk around the local streets of South Auckland, explicitly not allowed into my local library by my parents instruction, so I was left to walk around with not much to do and fend for myself until it was late in the day enough for me to go home. Reasons for this are complicated.

 During that particular year, I had a few quiet spots that were out of the way enough for me to avoid bringing attention to myself and to just nap away most of the day that's outside but out of the weather. During this time I reached a decision that no one was going to help me avoid being mislabelled for things that happen when I'm in loud over-stimulating environments and the only reason I can think of at the time that made things “too loud” or “too much” was that it was just too much information and I panic, and that then gets misinterpreted into various labels by my parents because they only saw the response, not the cause.

 One of these spots I was at a lot was a small creek that flowed through a semi-circle tunnel under a major road. Being a freshly built, well designed road, The geometry of the environment meant the only source of sound in the tunnel was the creek that was no more than half a meter wide. It flowed across exposed bedrock that was several meters wide on both sides. Over time I came up with an idea, that if loud environments mean “too much information”, maybe if I learn to break down what I'm hearing in new ways, I can compartmentalise, categorise and condense my experience with more ease, and it won't be “too much information” anymore and I won't panic as much. It started from then in small intentional steps, first was to stop thinking of all sounds as equal sound. To me at the time, an echo is just as much “a sound” as is white noise and just as much as a loudspeaker emitting sound. In a kind of cognitive “connect the dots” I taught myself to intentionally apply what I know about waves to sound, where an echo can contain just as much information about what it's reflecting off compared to the source of sound that the echo comes from.

 I learnt how the length, size and shape of the nearby creek is like a mirror image echo painted on the ceiling of the tunnel I was laying down in. And over time, the background noise of the creek itself went from “that's a noisily annoying creek, i wish things were quieter” to “i can see the creek  without seeing it, i can sense the echo on the roof reflecting it like I can see with my eyes, i can see how acoustically how far away it is and what direction, the subtle difference in echo that's telling me its bouncing off a metallic surface compared to another location I frequented that also had a flowing creek but was in a open environment with trees.

 I learnt to “see” cars without seeing them. I learnt what frequencies are commonly emitted by all vehicles at suburban speeds and focused on those, how they echo and bounce off parked cars that we drive past and have enough information to guess what kind of vehicle the echo came from, from a Ute to a van and other shapes. And I learnt to map my environment acoustically with those sounds. There were some experiments where I could be spatially aware of a vehicle's position more than 2km away, beyond anyone's ability to visually see by following sounds and echoes made as the car turns at corners and intersections.

 These experiences and others were the biggest help to my sensory experience at the time, it made sound and loud environments less panic inducing and at the time I had nothing else to focus on, so I practiced and experimented a lot with the sheer amount of free time I had available to me at the time.

 In late 2003, for complicated reasons I chose to take the opportunity myself for my first ever holiday by myself where I had the first real taste of freedom in every way to make choices and decisions for myself without parental narcissistic influence to prove to myself I was capable of being responsible and independent. Despite being a very scrawny, vulnerable looking 17 year old who looked out of place everywhere I went, I became a hitchhiking backpacker and travelled across the North Island of New Zealand for two glorious weeks. This did involve a lot of long distance walking through rural and remote areas across the country. It was here I got to experiment a lot more with my echolocation with a focus on experimenting with the relationship of the time delay between a sound generated and an echo received and how that changes the sound of the echo regardless of the shapes of various cliffsides I was walking parallel to, for example.

 Near the start of the following year in 2004 at age 17 I was admitted into a residential mental health unit that focused on preparing youth to be independent in the community. Reasons for this are complicated. About a month after I moved in, a particular event occurred. Me and several of the patients were taken to a local park for some physical activity and we decided to play a game called “blind man's bluff”. This is where someone is chosen to be blindfolded then they attempt to chase and touch-tag another player who's also moving around to avoid you and not blindfolded. When it came to my turn to be blindfolded, the game came to a stop within a few minutes and I was accused of cheating because I'm “too good at chasing” and accused of seeing through the blindfold somehow. I tried to explain to the others (“I'm just following the echo of the person I'm chasing by repeating a clicking noise with my tongue to make the echo”). But this was my first ever opportunity in my life to be in a safe space to describe what I’m doing but I had yet to learn how to so it wasn't a successful opportunity for communication. 

 During my stay in the mental health unit I was able to choose to return to high school for a final year. Because my parents chose to pull me out for a year, I would be a whole year older than my classmates, but I would be able to reach my higher personal academic goals without my parents restrictions. I had to adapt my auditory processing because this was the first time I was using echolocation actively in closed and artificial environments since I began actively experimenting; I changed my technique to produce my own single-sound to make the echo so I can gauge walls, doorways, tables, chairs and students even if I'm not looking at them due to my chronic avoidance of eye contact with others. This started with using the thud sound my dominant heel-strike walking gait makes, intentionally so people don't notice I'm doing it.

 Until this point in time, I had never discussed with other people what i'm doing other than responding with roughly “I'm listening to the echo im making” when I am rarely asked growing up, if ever. Around this point of time I asked myself for the first time how would I describe what I'm doing to myself? What kind of name would I call it to describe what I'm doing accurately?, assuming people around me were not doing the same thing. This is when I guessed it could be called echolocation because it sounded like I was using the same principles of sound that bats use for their echolocation to find their prey; And I tried to find more information about it instead of just teaching myself. But the internet was not designed for people back then for those who don't know terminology of a subject they are researching, let alone a subject of this niche size in that day and age, the closest information I could find was only about bats, not humans.

 At that point, I'd never heard about anyone else doing it and couldn't find anything about it on the internet. So after a while I stopped looking. I felt whatever I was doing and whatever it was called, it was at least definitely helping me and there's no reason I should stop or make a fuss about it. And since I was able to teach myself I didn't think I was the first one to learn, since other people would be capable of teaching themselves too.

 Now that I was back in high school, and actively using the skill on a daily, intentional purpose. I learnt how much of a positive impact it was having on my mental health. School life always has loud and noisy environments that can be sensory overload and overwhelm for me. But through using this skill, I was having noticeably less panic attacks, autistic meltdowns and shutdowns (even if I didn't know to call them that at that age), which had its own positive effects too. This reinforced my personal belief that what I was doing was helping a lot and motivated me to continue using it more.

 I discharged myself from the mental health unit the following year at age 18 and began living independently. I continued to use echolocation on a daily basis. It would briefly come up in conversation for the next few years when people see me using it intentionally, making a sound with my tongue or a clap to make an echo. Usually when I try to share it at this point, people usually are in disbelief and don't understand.

​​Moving to Christchurch, New Zealand 

 In 2007/8 I was living in Christchurch and was studying a Diploma of Elite Sport Performance. During study I also played games of “Blind Man's Bluff” with classmates but this time they were curious about how I was so good at it and this was my first opportunity to try to teach others echolocation. While we had our studies, we had a constant stream of 3-day long programs to introduce all students to a new sport or physical skill from a coaching perspective, and they offered me the chance to teach the other students echolocation for two hours a day for three days. I was able to apply what I learnt with me studying the fundamental principles about physical and cognitive skill development and progression during childhood to create my own echolocation teaching style and treat it like teaching a child a new skill around their own existing exteroception development and breaking things down into the smallest steps (applying existing auditory processing skills we all begin learning in early childhood and adapt them to echolocation processing with a kind of objective and reproducible approach to teaching). This has been the majority of my structure/focus of my echolocation teaching approach through life. Between 2007-2011 I taught echolocation to approximately 100 people with groups of 1-18 people, participating with an age range of 9-48 years old in a non-paid, amateur capacity.

 My sport performance studies led to several jobs around Christchurch involved in several sports. Biomechanics was one of my favorite subjects and I applied my echolocation skills combined with biomechanics in new ways to be a better coach. For example with the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, a frisbee in flight not only makes a sound through the air if thrown or spun fast enough, but it also creates an echo reflecting off the ground as it flies across the field. This not only improved my catching and throwing accuracy with this extra spatial information but during the same period of time I was able to demonstrate a better ability of catching frisbees thrown to me blindfolded compared to my classmates. (I did not have perfect accuracy blindfolded but was able to catch them a lot more frequently than my peers who did not know echolocation beforehand) And I used the opportunity to describe things to players of the sport in terms of the sounds certain throwing techniques create as another example.

 In late 2008 I took a road trip around all of New Zealand for 9 weeks, with what felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to explore familiar and unfamiliar locations but now with the auditory processing skills I didn't used to have growing up. I intentionally experimented in many biomes and natural environments across the diverse landscape New Zealand can provide, learning through the sheer amount of practice and experimentation available.

Moving to Beijing, China

 In 2009/10 I was living in Beijing, China. I can only speak English, and despite what people say about how much body language communicates, many don't realise body language is also culturally regional. So despite my brief job as an english immersion teacher, most of my cultural experience was more about listening and observing than actual talking and discussion. Not only is Beijing a very different place acoustically than any other city I've been to in my life, I had an opportunity to learn and adapt my echolocation skills. Parents of the person I was living with took me on countless single-day road trips where we got to drive and explore the countryside almost 6 hours drive in every direction out of the city. This took me to biomes and natural environments that I never expected or explored before, from karst formation canyons to wide reaching wetlands.

 Twice a year, Beijing experiences an intense electrical storm season, when usually in the evenings, clouds gather and while usually in-cloud lightning, it can have so much frequent lightning and intense enough that you can feel constant vibrations in the ground. These meteorological seasons I was able to apply my echolocation skills to learn about the sound of lightning versus the sound of its echo as thunder. These opportunities gave me a chance to experiment and learn how to process multiple echoes, not just to be spatially aware of lightning that's obscured in the clouds, but also to learn the shape of the storm cloud itself contained in the sound of thunder.

 Chinese new year has a lot of fireworks, and saying that is an understatement, I have never seen so much volume, variety and intensity of fireworks than I bet anywhere else on that planet, it's one of the best and special cultural events that humanity has on display. At this point, I had not experienced an earthquake before but at that point, I had never felt the ground move so much before, and that's just the energy of fireworks that the ground absorbs. It truly is an overwhelming auditory environment, with Beijing having an average height of building being at least 7 stories tall. So many echoes bounce between the buildings because I'd say at least 60% of all fireworks don't even shoot high enough to clear the roofs of buildings. Even though I experienced two chinese new years, I was not able to learn to process an auditory environment like that before or ever again.

​​​Returning to Christchurch, New Zealand

 I returned to Christchurch in early 2011 and went to study several things at the University of Canterbury. Christchurch had their major earthquake swarm begin less than a year prior and when I returned, Christchurch was still experiencing a dozen aftershocks a day that were strong enough for human perception. Earthquakes can be a very anxiety inducing thing. After the quakes began, many people chose to leave but it became a community attitude to support each others mental health through this crisis, people felt supported in whichever decision they choose to stay or leave or return at any point, typically no one was left feeling weak for leaving for firmer ground and no one was called arrogant or stubborn for staying. Earthquakes and aftershocks became a common experience in the community and was a topic a lot of people felt open to discuss about their experiences.

 As soon as I landed back in Christchurch, I was acutely aware of many aftershocks that locals have just gotten used to. But there were still some aftershocks that left people mentally shaken up. Since earthquakes are still pressure waves and studying a geohazards topic for a semester gave me enough tools that if a quake was loud enough, I could glean some spatial information from it and it won't be so overwhelming when the larger ones roll by. Some close friends at university became impressed at my accuracy and speed to guess where it came from faster than government run earthquake reporting websites would update 2-5 mins after an aftershock.

 Over 10 months in 2011 I taught about 18 people in total how to listen to earthquakes for the purpose to not find earthquakes as anxiety-triggering or overwhelming by learning to listen to the echoes that are produced. And everyone I taught reported back that it helped their anxiety. Some of my housemates I was living with would play a game that as soon as an aftershock passes when we were together doing something like watching TV, we would just outstretch our arm in the direction the quake came from; usually within 5 - 15s afterwards. Those who were good at it, could be within 10 degrees of each others direction 90% of the time, (usually while your learning you have a high chance of pointing in the opposite of the correct direction because they didn't hear the sound that can happen momentarily before some earthquakes arrive to the echolocators perspective). 

 I attempted at this point to look again, to see if there was anything on the internet about human echolocation and I found nothing. I did have some people think I was plain lying about listening to earthquakes and I tried to see if there were any recorded experiences of others (other than myself and those I've taught) to help back up my claims, but there was none I could find so word spread by word of mouth very slowly. 

 By this point I didn't see echolocation as a cure or solution or even a cute party trick; only a supplementary skill amongst the many we learn in life. I personally, with this skill in hand, despite learning to process it with the same echolocation principles I use, I still experienced aftershocks that were still just too much anxiety inducing despite my sensory overload training and were a major reason for me choosing to leave and move to Melbourne, Australia at the end of the school year in 2011.

Moving to Melbourne, Australia

 In 2014 for complex reasons, I found myself homeless living on the streets in an encampment near the aquarium in Melbourne's CBD. I adapted my echolocation skills with what I had learnt in the early days about car engines and it's a handy survival hack in that situation to be aware of your surroundings even if wrapped up in a sleeping bag and not want to draw attention to yourself in a typical “sleep with one eye open” approach and has definitely helped me totally avoid at least half a dozen potential assault incidents while I was sleeping rough for 8 months (Note: sadly, there are people, some kind of minority of people, who look for homeless people for the purpose to hurt them) (Extra note: After being homeless for 8 months, things improved and I did succeed in finding safe and stable housing moving forward).

 In 2017 I got to participate in the Sydney Mardi gras parade. I was told in advance how loud it could get, but if you have sound sensitivities, I was woefully unprepared. At the beginning of the parade route is the loudest of the spectators. Due to the sheer number screaming all things about love intensely it reaches the auditory pain threshold of our hearing range. Auditory overwhelm flew to overload and prime time for a panic attack when trying to appear presentable to crowds. I drew on my echolocation, applied my critical thinking skills to find an echo to focus on. I enabled the ability of the crowd making a constant scream to seek out an equally constant but quieter echo, I sensed one and its structural information of the environment that I couldn't visually see due to my synaesthesia flaring up in loud environments as well. It was the sound of the crowd rising vertically and interacting with all the high rise balcony based sticking out, that bounced back a quieter constant echo and I drew all the focus I could on that echo to get through the worst of the crowds where it's much less loud. It felt like I could sense the vertical column of little echoes bouncing off from under the terraces, the higher up the building was. I was able to use my echolocation here to focus and hone in on a somewhat loud by constant echo. But quiet enough that all that extra screaming around me was just that bit less intense, but enough to overcome the immediate unexpected obstacles to avoid any panic attacks or panic-reactive-lashing out, kind of way.

 In 2024 I came to understand my Autism diagnosis and what that means for me and how it makes many connections and has made my life just that little less confusing and overwhelming. I know that this is where my sound sensitivities have come from and why I have always had a different auditory experience than my peers. But because I taught myself and others echolocation long before I learnt this diagnosis, it has never been a factor of how I learn, teach it or how students I've had learnt.

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My hopes that in sharing my learning and teaching experiences in an objective and reproducible way, it can create new dialogue and research in the community about complex concepts I haven't seen explored by others yet.

(Final personal note: I do apologise for this personal journey to sound so laden with traumatic situations, I have tried my best to avoid any potential major triggers for the reader while keeping the reality of the situations I have lived through honest. I am happy to report that I have successfully become much more safer, loved and supported in my life and in my healing than I used to be)

If you have gotten this far, thank you for your time!