Perception of object length by sound

Although hearing is classically considered a temporal sense, everyday liste ning suggests that subtle spatial properties constitute an important parr o f what people know about the world through sound. Typically neglected in ps ychoacoustics research, the ability to perceive the precise sizes of object s on the basis of sound was investigated during the routine event of droppi ng wooden dowels of different lengths onto a hard surface. In two experimen ts, the ordinal and metrical success of naive listeners was related to leng th but not to the simple acoustic variables (duration, amplitude, frequency ) likely to be related to it. Additional analysis suggests the potential re levance of an object's inertia tensor in constraining perception of that ob ject's length, analogous to the case that has been made for perceiving leng th by effortful touch.