‘Seeing’ through echolocation

Justin Louchart went blind almost 10 years ago, but he has learned to “see” again using sound. Today, the 20-year-old WMU junior is helping others who are blind do likewise, traveling the world to share his expertise in using simple tongue clicks to detect objects, enabling him to carry on a wide range of activities, from walking to running to riding a bike. He teaches others the art of flash sonar, a type of echolocation that allows people to sense objects around them by making clicking noises with their tongues and listening to the sound waves reflect off objects back to them. WMU’s own Department of Blindness and Low Vision Studies teaches echolocation as one technique in its orientation and mobility curricula. The department plans to have Louchart demonstrate flash sonar to students this spring. Louchart, who is studying anthropology at WMU, went completely blind in 2005 due to a combination of genetic disorders and retinal damage he suffered from being born prematurely. With help from Daniel Kish, executive director of World Access for the Blind, Louchart taught himself how to see objects through flash sonar. “It’s amazingly straightforward,” Louchart says. “By making a series of tongue clicks and listening to the sound reflected back, it shows you the distance, size and even the texture of objects. You can make out the world around you.” Before Louchart became blind, he remembers seeing just a few seconds of a documentary that showed two blind people riding bicycles and making clicking noises. “The process seemed very intuitive to me,” Louchart recalls. “If you don’t have vision, why not use sound, which you do have, to be able to utilize the visual sense?” Memories of that documentary came flooding back to Louchart after he lost his sight. He decided to try flash sonar on his own and made some progress with the technique. His efforts took a giant leap in 2007 after he met Kish. “He started teaching me and made my skills exponentially better,” Louchart says. “You can be self-taught, but your skills don’t get especially good until you learn it formally.” Louchart uses a cane in tandem with flash sonar. The cane provides excellent acuity roughly 5 feet from an object. Flash sonar can detect objects much farther away, plus he can aim its direction and adjust its pitch and volume to give a surprisingly three-dimensional image of the surrounding environment. Photo Caption: WMU student Justin Louchart travels the world teaching echolocation to people who are blind. One of Louchart’s newest clients is Anthony Wilcox-Lazzara, a Portage, Mich., sixth grader. Here, Anthony learns how to detect an object’s distance by making clicking tones with his tongue and listening to how the sound waves reflect back to him. (Photo Omitted: see pdf) “Flash sonar anticipates the environment well before you reach it with a cane,” he says. “For me and everybody like me, this really changes how you see the world around you.” Louchart, who is from Saginaw, Mich., has learned how to do many of the things he used to do before he lost his sight. He hikes, rides bikes, mountain climbs and does other things people think would be impossible for somebody who can’t see. Today, Louchart uses Kish’s model to teach others the technique as a part-time instructor for World Access for the Blind. Most of Louchart’s lessons are taught in intensive, one-on-one sessions or very small workshops that span eight to 10 hours over four days. His students are primarily children. Within five to seven days, the technique becomes second nature. Louchart, who speaks English, Latin and Italian, is learning Russian, Spanish, French, German and Arabic and teaches primarily in the United States and Italy. He has one student in Mexico and two in Canada and also has taught in Germany. All of the World Access for the Blind teachers are blind. They use Kish’s model to help blind people teach themselves to be mobile rather than rely on established routes, either self-taught or taught by someone else. Kish’s model teaches techniques like flash sonar to support their mobility without routes or ascribed pathways. “If you’re not going to use a particular route every single day, the benefit of flash sonar is you have the ability to acoustically landmark to such great distances, you can see when features of your landscape change,” Louchart says. “You navigate as you go without needing everything to be in the same place all the time.” Louchart hopes to go into field research and has co-written a book on mobility techniques titled “The Beginner’s Guide to Echolocation.” He plans to earn a master’s degree in orientation and mobility and pursue two doctoral degrees in anthropology. For now, he’s happy to share his expertise so others can do as much as he does. “It isn’t that we’re special or unique-everyone can do it,” he says. “We’re just helping them learn how.”