Half paraboloid (parabola of revolution) ear trumpet by fizzup

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

An owl moved into my neighbourhood. I could hear it every morning, but I never could see it. I built this half paraboloid, which I had hoped I could use to find the direction of the "too-hoo" sound in the morning and see the owl.
The parabola has a focus 30 mm "above" the base, so if you hold the bottom of the bowl at about the rear edge of your ear, it should focus the sound right near the opening of your ear canal. Because it is so small, this parabola will only focus fairly high frequency sounds - honestly it only gets good at about the limit of human hearing. However, it does reject sounds from the sides very well.
The owl has decamped for a place with more rodents, I suppose, because the too-hooing stopped between the time I had printed the trumpet and the next Saturday.
An ambitious designer could remix this to have a pair of these with ear pads and a half-hoop to be worn like headphones. Then you would really look like a doofus so make sure to use a bright colour.