Now, I'm sure you already know all this, and have listened to your fair share of binaural demo recordings-things like rain, or crickets or someone cutting your hair. The result is a remarkable "you are there" experience. To play back a binaural recording, you have to put the speakers back to where the microphones were. The result is a remarkable "you are there" experience There are other ways to make a binaural recording, but the dummy head is the classic way, and probably the best. The dummy head does all the encoding, naturally. The two output signals, one from each ear, are recorded to two tracks. Critically, the microphones are placed where your eardrums would be. The dummy head is the size of a human head, complete with nose and ears. The best way to make a binaural recording is with a dummy head, which looks like a human head and has probably freaked out more TSA baggage inspectors than all other microphones combined. While it seems complicated, it is how we naturally hear sounds. For example, the ears are spaced a distance apart, and the head casts a frequency-dependent acoustic shadow so that, for example, sounds from one side arrive later at the far ear and have a rolled-off frequency response at that ear. That physical arrangement leads to a very specific encoding of sounds.
In particular, we have two ears facing in opposite directions placed on either side of a head. In contrast, binaural is a recording technique that replicates the way we naturally hear sounds. Sure, you get phantom images and all that, but it's an entirely artificial and unnatural way of recording and playing sound. Stereo can be encoded in any number of ways and played back over two loudspeakers or headphones. Binaural, then, is a special kind of stereo. All binaural recordings are stereo, but almost no stereo recordings are binaural. My question then, is why aren't you listening to binaural recordings?īinaural is often confused with stereo, but they are quite different.
#Binaural recording text software#
How many of you often listen through headphones? Thanks to that camera looking back at you from your device, and some pretty cool software I got from a guy in Russia, I can see that many of you do indeed listen through headphones.
0 kommentar(er)
