Molly Burke was walking through a park with no cane and no guide dog when she stopped, reached out, and put her hand on a tree. Her boyfriend, who was filming, was baffled. The tree wasn’t making a sound. There was no wind—nothing he could perceive. But Burke, who is blind, had known it was there before she touched it. “This tree was so loud, it freaked me out,” she told him.
Burke, a blind advocate and content creator, shared the moment on TikTok in a video that has racked up hundreds of thousands of views. What she’s using is called passive echolocation, and as she explained to Newsweek, it’s a real, trainable navigation skill—not a party trick or a superpower.
The key to it is a concept she calls sound shadows, and it flips our intuition. Burke isn’t hearing a noise the tree is making. She’s hearing the way the tree changes the sound around it by blocking, absorbing, and reflecting the ambient noise of the environment. A solid object creates a kind of hole in the soundscape—a shadow—and to a trained ear, that absence is as detectable as a sound.
When Burke says the tree was “loud,” she means it was loudly interrupting everything else. “Echolocation is a technique used by some blind people to help us navigate,” she said. “I was trained in passive echolocation by my orientation and mobility instructor as a child.”
That training started young and was surprisingly rigorous. Burke, who has retinitis pigmentosa and lost her sight gradually, has described being made to walk down a street while blindfolded and count the trees she passed using nothing but changes in sound. It’s the same skill that once stopped her cold in a shopping mall as a teenager, when she suddenly sensed thick pillars in front of her and reached out to feel them, much to her parents’ confusion. Her brain had detected the sound shadows before she consciously understood why.
It’s worth distinguishing the version Burke uses from the one that usually goes viral. Passive echolocation, which Burke uses, relies on interpreting the ambient sounds already present in an environment. Active echolocation, popularized by Daniel Kish, involves making sharp clicks with the tongue and interpreting the echoes that bounce back, much like a bat or dolphin. Both are legitimate. Both are teachable. And research has found that blind practitioners tend to be markedly better at echolocation than sighted people, for the obvious reason that they’ve had more practice.
Burke’s point in sharing the clip was to show that this is a concrete skill with a name and a training method—one more of the countless quiet adaptations that make up navigating the world without sight.
“It’s not just a cool party trick,” she wrote in the video caption. “It’s a useful skill that I’m grateful my O&M instructor taught me as a child.”
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