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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

Man the amount of honking is insane in India.

I was visiting a relative in Patna and it's like everybody just honks for the sake on honking. I mean I thought delhi was bad, but this place just takes honking to a whole new level. It's so bad that I had to go inside a random shop to wait for my Ola as the sound levels were literally unbearable.

The only place where I haven't seen so much honking is Goa. Maybe the traffic is less or people are different but that's like the only place where the roads are somewhat quiet.

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I've always observed that in India honking the horn is not just about overtaking - it's an acoustic indicator of your position, making it possible for those in front of you to plot your presence without taking their eyes off the road in front (which usually requires their absolute and undivied attention). Additionally, as the article points out, many vehicles don't possess funtional rear-view mirrors, and are therefore dependent on acoustic signals to know what's going on around them.

> it's an acoustic indicator of your position, making it possible for those in front of you to plot your presence without taking their eyes off the road in front

So you're saying Indian drivers have developed echo-location.

Echo-location is about using reflected sound to detect the position of silent barriers/objects in the vicinity. This is about detecting the position of sound sources, which is something nearly everyone does all the time.

That said, humans are capable of echolocation with practice and it is commonplace in some cultures.

Until you get inside a city traffic jam, and then it becomes an acoustic indicator of something you already know: every square centimeter around you is covered by a car or a motorbike.

I'm a skeptical horns help with anything in modern Indian city traffic, but on the highway they can be quite useful, if annoying, especially on mountainous road when you don't have a good line of sight, but even just on a normal road with drivers who don't look on their rear-view mirrors.

There's a totally different regard for noise and public spaces generally. Add temple loudspeakers and other events to the list.

Video conferencing with our colleagues in India during Diwali is an incredible experience.

Had the same experience, Goa was the only oasis of sanity we found. Also they didn't seem to create these toxic plastic fires that were otherwise ubiquitous.

It's like a group sonar.

I wonder what are the implications for the automated cars.

My intuition suggests it would make a lot of things easier as you can figure out a lot of geometry with a prominent sound like a car horn but with visual analysis you have to extract signal from way more noise. I'm not a ML engineer though at all, nor even well-read in these topics

I've heard that submarines can now extract information from ambient ocean noise. Car honkings and traffic noise have got to be at least as useful, for the roads. Would require a microphone array to be added to the car.

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