Binaural Audio

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before in this, or some other blog, but I have this love for binaural recordings.

Binaural sounds like it might be quite complex but really, it is anything but! It’s such an easy thing for anyone to do. Let me explain the process and how it all works.

Recording live music binaurally

We, as human beings, hear sound through a pair of ears, located either side of our head. These ears are separated by about 5-8 inches on the same horizontal plane. They capture & shape the audio, and focus it on the ear drum which in turn vibrates tiny bones and the brain interprets that as sound. So, the binaural method simply places 2 microphones about 5-8 inches apart and on the same horizontal plane. These each occupy one of two tracks that, when played back through stereo headphones, give the binaural effect. The left mic feeds the left channel and the right feeds the right, therefore the sound that is recorded is recorded the same way we hear it.

Nuemann KU100 Binaural Microphone

Of course, the drawback is that you have to listen to binaural recordings through headphones to get the best effect. Listening through regular stereo speakers pretty much loses the effect. The best bit about binaural is how it recreates the full three dimensional soundscape that we experience in real life. Because of the way our brain decodes incoming audio to the ears, it places all sounds for us in the three dimensions. Because binaural recording accurately replicates this method of audio capture, when you listen back, the brain performs the same processing and it decodes the hidden spatial information and it feels like we’re actually there. Sounds that happen above the mics, when played back, appear to be occurring overhead, even when there is no speaker there! It’s simple, clever stuff.

Binaural Microphone

You can easily make your own binaural recordings by acquiring two microphones, wiring them up so that each one feeds one channel of a stereo pair and then placing them in the right position and plugging into a recorder. Some people use elaborate dummy heads that have replica ears, with all the pinae and a mic buried where the ear cavity is. Some just attach the mics to their shirt collars or their regular headphones with crocodile clips!

Recording binaurally out in the field

So, what prompted me to write this post was finding this group on SoundCloud…

Binaural Recording

Choc full of some lovely home made binaural work, there are some proper little gems in here.

But for some really awesome binaural stuff, check out Bilocation by Steve Marshall. This 41 minute piece is a blend of ambient sounds, music and general audio joy. It is available on regular Binaural stereo CD or in DTS 5.1 on DVD. On this version, Steve used transaural processing to utilise the 6 speaker configuration of most home cinema set ups. Listening to the 5.1 version requires you to sit in a “sweet spot” but you are freed from the shackles of headphones. Steve wrote an article for Sound On Sound that better explains the processes he used.

So, whack on some headphones and have a listen to the recordings offered over at SoundCloud, and then, if you feel inspired, go out and make some of your own! There’s no clever jiggery pokery involved! 🙂