Binaural Sound

Binaural sound is any sound that has been recorded to be binaural - to take into account the spatial properties of the human head, and to distort differently according to the shape of the head, and the distance from each ear.

As such, binaural sounds echo around the user in 3D space, and are calculated relative to the position of the user's avatar, such that the sound reaches each ear at a slightly different time, corresponding to the sound source's virtual position relative to the user. This allows the brain's natural ability to pinpoint sounds to come into play, and greatly increases the sensory realism of the environment.

See Also: Binaural, Feedback Channel, Sonification

Below, we offer a selection of links from our resource databases which may match this term.

Acoustic Shock Auditory Display Auditory Localization Binaural Sound

Convolve Convolvotron Sonification

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Hearing with more than Just Ears

It might well be that current experiments with binaural sound for VR 3D recreation of sounds based on the relative positions of the ears, and the head shape of the listener, are not quite getting the full picture of sound reception. It seems facial skin also has a part to play.

Podcast: Woody Norris: Inventing the next amazing thing: Directional Sound
The talk is primarily focussed on demonstrating his new invention 'hypersonic sound'. It is essentially a way to precisely focus sound, or as the inventor puts it "put sound where you want to." This has obvious implications for 3D sound effects in virtual reality and channeled sound cones in augmented reality.

Echo vision: The man who sees with sound
The story of Daniel Kish, a man whose senses are out of balance; a man who sees with sound.

Sound in the Brain: An Orderly Orchestra of Synapses
Unlike the mapping of the sense of smell, which has odourant maps all over the olfactory bulb in no particular order, the sense of sound is remarkably well ordered. Synapses line up in an overlapping orchestra, with multiple redundancies, a study has found.

A Silent World
The value of sound is ofter overlooked when designing a virtual world, who, for all the prolieration of speaker systems, all too often concentrate on visual only - especially the non gameworlds.

Why Recoil at Unpleasant Noise Occurs
Nails on a blackboard. It is an unbearable noise, one that sends shivers through anyone who hears it. But why does it do this, and more importantly, how can a virtual environment replicate the effect in any sound?

New Implant Promises Prosthetic Near-Natural Hearing
We finally understand enough about the way sound signals are processed into electrical signals, to go one better than the cochlea implant. We can tap directly into the auditory nerve itself.

Haptics via Ultrasound
All manner of approaches are being fielded these days to try and create a workable haptic interface, that allows the true feeling of touch to an object that is only virtually there. One of the more esoteric, is the use of sound to shape the pressure fields in the air. Specifically, the use of ultrasound.

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