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:
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(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.
Further Examples of Binaural Recording:
3 Comments:
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17:13
Hello from Bob Schulein,
I noted from your posting that your group has constructed a dummy binaural head and made some test recordings. Congratulations on this work.
This has been an area of study and interest to me for the past 10 years or so and I have been working on an entertainment format based on this concept.
My technique involves binaural capture along with point of view HD video. Some of my work is posted on YouTube. Please search using the word ImmersAV.
Samples that have been receiveing the most hits are by “Fat Brass”-Rehab, “The Ackermans’-little Bird of Heaven, and “Svetalana Belsky” – Rachmaninoff Piano solo.
All comments are appreciated.
If there is interest I can supply a variety of articles and technical papers on this subject.
Best regards,
Bob Schulein
13:25
Hi Bob, thanks for getting in touch. I had a listen to a couple of your recordings – very nice. Did you build your own dummy head too?
We didn’t actually build the dummy head ourselves, but it was hand-made by the person we hired it from, and very anatomically accurate – with a (plastic) skull, a foam brain, etc. We’re really pleased with the quality of the recordings we’ve managed to make with it, and looking forward to seeing how people react to them!
06:47
Thanks for an idea, you sparked at thought from a angle I hadn’t given thoguht to yet. Now lets see if I can do something with it.