February 2010
Dummy Head Recording
This week we’ve been recording a lot of sounds using a recording technique known as “binaural recording” or, more specifically, “dummy head recording”. This involves using an acoustically realistic dummy head with microphones in its ears to produce recordings which, when listened to on headphones, convey an extremely realistic sense of space – often creating the illusion that the sound is actually in the room around the listener. This is because the acoustics of the head and especially the ears play very important roles in allowing us to derive spatial information from the sound that we hear – information which is lost with most ordinary recording techniques.
To hear an example of what these recordings sound like, try listening to this with headphones:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
(Sounds in this example: jangling keys, rustling bags, fake motorbike engine)
The primary purpose of the recordings that we’re making is for an experiment / activity that we’re planning to run at the Science Open Day here at Royal Holloway on the 27th February, but if that goes well we’re hoping to use them subsequently in a range of auditory attention-related experiments.