Friday, January 16. 2009
See the overview from the old home page (click here to view it)  
HEADPHONE BINAURAL: - provides virtual audio - all around you!
- requires no special equipment - just your stereo headphones
- you can experience it anywhere - in privacy or with someone
- loudspeaker-compatible.. also gives you superb surround sound via surround decoder
Catalogued CDs listed in the old system are temporarily unavailable.
We'll announce changes here. Click here to send feedback or ask questions using a popup form.
Saturday, September 6. 2008
from MAKE Magazine by Marc de Vinck 
This is a really interesting Arduino project that involves manipulating
stereo sound so it appears to move in a virtual 3-dimensional space.
There is a lot of interesting information in the forum and the code can be found here.
The effect is so sharp, you can tell the difference between
center, ten degrees left of center and ten degrees right of center. I
was so surprised, I thought it might be due to wishful thinking, so I
turned off the stereo volume adjustments... even with just the delay
and no change in the volume between left and right, you can hear the
sound move from side to side. What's even weirder is that if you listen
to just one side, the sound stays the same.
Read more about Manipulating perceived position of sound
Sunday, April 27. 2008
A previous entry focused on sounds produced by the ears as directed by the brain. The Radio Lab program, which itself appears to use binaural recordings (they would neither confirm or deny), featured as a link in this item, further details the phenomena of sounds produced by the brain.
Whether you have auditory hallucinations, stuck tunes, or receive broadcasts from your internal radio station, this is familar conversational fodder. Are these things like the visuals from dreams - does experience deepen the color, intensity, localization, and resulting cues, or something else?
Hope you enjoy the program:
http://audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast042208.mp3
Saturday, April 5. 2008
Hugo Zuccarelli laments the negative reaction to his reporting of facts about the ear and also shows outstanding demonstrations of holophonically created spatial accoustics played through speakers in this 1992 video.
In Beyond the Zonules of Zinn, (from the book
jacket) "David Bainbridge combines on otherworldly journey through the
central nervous system with an accessible and entertaining account of
how the brain's anatomy has often mislead anatomists about its
function."
In Chapter 8, "The Little Fish Who Never Grew Up,
The origins of the ear", a controversial contention of Hugo Zuccerelli,
that sound is produced by the ear, generally dismissed as "silly", is
expanded in the excerpt.
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/unearthed-archives-hugo-zuccarelli-part-2/1967920814
"The mammalian ear has evolved two even more useful innovations that improved its ability to serve as a microphone. The first is that it has become on active system - the brain not only receives sensory information from the cochlea, but it is also constantly modifying the cochleas's responses to sound. We now think that only a quarter of all the hair cells in your cochlea are sensory - the other three quarters are being constantly driven to vibrate by motor impulses from the brain. By wiggling selected regions of the cochlear membranes, these active hair cells can suppress spurious oscillations that reduce the ear's ability to discriminate tones - they reduce the "blur" in the sound signal. This allows us to determine pitch much more precisely, and possibly helps us distinguish among several sounds all heard at the same time. This active control of the cochlea is why Ramon y Cajal did not use the ear to show the direction that impulses pass through neurons - most of the nerve connection to the ear are motor, not sensory, with dendrites pointing to the brain and axons pointing to the sense organ. It also explains one of the weirdest phenomena in neurology: otoaccoustic emissions. Because most of the hair cells are forcing the cochlear membranes to vibrate, the cochlea actually produces sounds, and sometimes these sounds are audible to an outside listener. For example, pediatricians have reported tones being emitted from their patients' ears. This is not the same thing as tinnitus, or "ringing in the ears",in which you yourself hear the tones - the otoaccoustic emissions are genuine sounds coming out from normal ears."
Wednesday, February 6. 2008
Many chapters still to go for me, but so far it is an informative, equasion-free examination of the determinators of realistic listening. You can get to the text of the book at Mr. Glasgal's site:
Ambiophonics,
2nd Edition
Replacing Stereophonics to Achieve
Concert-Hall Realism
By Ralph Glasgal
Chapter 3
Understanding Stereophonic Sound Fields
Human hearing using two ears is called
binaural and was developed by evolution. Binaural sound is what most of us listen to all
the time. Audiophiles sometimes think of binaural sound as a recording made with a dummy
head and played back through earphones. This is a poor imitation of the real thing and is
not what we will mean when we refer to the binaural hearing mechanism in this book.
Saturday, January 5. 2008
Name of sender: Bernard Rousseau
Email of sender: bprousseau has a hotmail address
------------------------- COMMENTS -------------------------
I know it has been explained with great detail in many papers, but maybe I can humbly add my 2-cents worth. From personal experience, the most important factors for true binaural recordings are:- The use of OMNI-Directional Condenser microphones
- The spacing between the mikes (8 inches, more?) and most important,
- Proper phasing of the L & R signals.
When I experimented with the Hafler "rear" channel system in the 1970s, I learned to reverse the phase of an encoded "rear" channel mixed with the L-R music channels. When the phasing is wrong, the binaural effect is destroyed. The panorama of acoustical musical instruments is gone, headphones or speakers (in the sweet spot). BR Dec-07
Bernard Rousseau is a collector of country and bluegrass music, as well as a sound engineer who had a recording studio in Kingston, Tennessee, ca. 1960-85. Rousseau recorded live performances of musicians at bluegrass and country music festivals, fiddlers’ conventions, and music clubs and lounges. He welcomes your questions. You can find details of the archived collection at East Tennessee State University by following the link:
http://www.etsu.edu/cass/Archives/Collections/afindaid/a469.htm
Friday, October 12. 2007
New Hearing Mechanism Discovered
Science Daily — MIT researchers have discovered a hearing mechanism that fundamentally changes the current understanding of inner ear function. This new mechanism could help explain the ear's remarkable ability to sense and discriminate sounds. Its discovery could eventually lead to improved systems for restoring hearing.
MIT Professor Dennis M. Freeman, working with graduate student Roozbeh Ghaffari and research scientist Alexander J. Aranyosi, found that the tectorial membrane, a gelatinous structure inside the cochlea of the ear, is much more important to hearing than previously thought. It can selectively pick up and transmit energy to different parts of the cochlea via a kind of wave that is different from that commonly associated with hearing. You decide what's important to read and follow up on:
The introductory article from Science Daily - New Hearing Mechanism Discovered! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases or... the abstract of Binaural and cochlear disparities:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/moretolink
fulltext:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/moretolink
PDF at 1.7 MB:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/moretolink
Sunday, June 24. 2007
Headphone listening is expanding. The best recording techniques vary as do the results. Playback results can be enhanced by software control. The PDF or HTML versions of this paper,
Response of Human Skull to Bone Conducted Sound in the Audiometric to Ultrasonic Range
may help your own mushy part see what is ahead.
Sunday, January 28. 2007
AUDIO ENGINEERING SOCIETY
Detroit Section - Meeting
WHEN: Thursday, February 8th
TOPIC: Binaural Recording: 1932 - 2007 Creating Realistic Sound Fields Using Only Two Audio Channels
SPEAKER: Robert B. Schulein RSS Consultants Schaumburg, IL
TIME: Meeting starts at 7pm For Details, Go to :http://www.provide.net/~djcarlst/aes_next.htm
LOCATION: Alpine Electronics of America, inc 27101 Hills Tech Court Farmington Hills, Michigan
PRE-MEETING DINNER: Ruby Tuesday, on west side of Haggerty just north of 12 Mile, Farmington Hills, Michigan. From 5:30 pm.
OPEN TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES! Non-AES-Members Welcome!
Friday, November 17. 2006
The source is SourceForge, the most trusted name in Open Source Software, so you know it is safe. The reference page contains a detailed explanation of the conversion process that is worthwhile on its own. Both lines below point to the exact same URL.
Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP
http://bs2b.sourceforge.net/
Thursday, November 16. 2006
This is about temporary hearing/listening testing and evaluation. Use the pictures and text as a guide to explore your perception and sound imaging system.
 "I use the hands-cupped-round-pinnae to demonstrate degrees of externalisation for my students. Cupping them facing forwards makes one's own voice 'in head' and cupping them facing backwards makes one's own voice 'very externalised'. One of each pans the source direction towards the forward-facing cupped hand."
"Binaural afficianados can easily "learn" a standardized head and pinnae. Just for fun, try cupping your hands over your ears to create outrageously large pinnae, keep them that way for around two minutes, listen carefully, then let go back to normal. Tell us what you heard. I, for one, still can hear directionally quite accurately if I use my eyes to calibrate my audible impressions for a short while."
Monday, November 13. 2006
Huggins Pitch depends upon sound entering from both ears. You don't perceive i t if you listen monaurally.
Here is the original link:
http://www.parmly.luc.edu/parmly/huggins.html
A more focused explanation:
http://www.s3.kth.se/~molin/Huggins_html/huggins.html
A detailed pdf on the subject:
http://www.s3.kth.se/~molin/Huggins_html/huggins.pdf
Friday, November 10. 2006
This source, more like an online book than a tutorial, focuses on human-computer interaction, but contains an interesting section on binaural technology.
Go to the section on binaural technology:
http://www.ai.rug.nl/~lambert/projects/miami/
The table of contents:
http://www.ai.rug.nl/~lambert/projects/miami/taxonomy/node1.html
Wednesday, November 8. 2006
A "kid" encyclopedia, this definition of binaural recording may assist your learning.
http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/bi/Binaural_recording
Monday, November 6. 2006
This is a tutorial paper giving an introduction to the perception of multichannel sound reproduction. The important underlying psychoacoustic phenomena are reviewed – starting with the behaviour of the auditory periphery and moving on through binaural perception, central binaural phenomena and cognition. The author highlights the way the perception of a recording can be changed according to the number of replay channels used. The paper opens the question of relating perceptual and cognitive responses to directional sound or to sound fields.
http://www.meridian.co.uk/ara/multips3.pdf
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