How Do Soft Things Absorb Sound?

An echo is when you shout something and it hits a solid wall and comes back to you. Depending on how far away that solid object is will depend how long it takes to hear that echo. So in a room, you don't hear the echo is distinctly but if you're shouting across a canyon, however long that sound takes to reach the opposite side of the canyon is how long the echo is. You could actually measure distance by using sound. Which is how sonar works. Or echo location that bats and dolphins use. They bounce the sound off an object and they're able to tell just by how long it took to come back into their ears.