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Jen-in-Wellies

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A program this evening on radio 3 at 23:30.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fdw8

 

From the description:

Someone living on a canal boat on temporary moorings must move their boat every two weeks. This feature captures the journey of Gus who is moving his boat on a Sunday afternoon in Autumn from the Camden Eco moorings to bustling Hoxton.

During this recording, you can hear binaurally captured sound of towpath life, moorhens nesting on the banks and the movement through the 800-metre-long Islington Tunnel. You also hear Gus manoeuvring through the city road lock. The piece ends with Gus’ new neighbour reading a traditional canal song called ‘The First Cargo,’ compiled in Folk Tales from the Canal Side by Ian Douglas.

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16 minutes ago, Athy said:

 "Binaurally"? Is that another way of saying "in stereo"?

 No, stereo is just 2 channels picked up by 2 microphones slightly apart. Binaural mimics the head and ears giving a much more 3 dimensional sound experience. It’s been around for decades but it is pretty impressive. All to do with the way the sound wave propagation is modified by the presence of the head and the complex shape of the ears. And of course the way the brain interprets those slight phase shifts etc. Your brain is cleverer than you think!

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11 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

 No, stereo is just 2 channels picked up by 2 microphones slightly apart. Binaural mimics the head and ears giving a much more 3 dimensional sound experience. It’s been around for decades but it is pretty impressive. All to do with the way the sound wave propagation is modified by the presence of the head and the complex shape of the ears. And of course the way the brain interprets those slight phase shifts etc. Your brain is cleverer than you think!

With added tinnitus noise I hope

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14 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

And of course the way the brain interprets those slight phase shifts etc. Your brain is cleverer than you think!

The way just two fixed ears, one each side, can tell if a noise is in front of you, or behind amazes me. Obviously a strong evolutionary pressure to have this (where is the sabre toothed tiger?!).

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30 minutes ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

The way just two fixed ears, one each side, can tell if a noise is in front of you, or behind amazes me. Obviously a strong evolutionary pressure to have this (where is the sabre toothed tiger?!).

And range finding as well. In the original demonstration of binaural sound there was a guy talking whilst walking around you. Then he came up behind and very close. I swear I could actually feel his hot breath on my neck, so powerful was the illusion. Made me flinch!

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4 hours ago, nicknorman said:

And range finding as well. In the original demonstration of binaural sound there was a guy talking whilst walking around you. Then he came up behind and very close. I swear I could actually feel his hot breath on my neck, so powerful was the illusion. Made me flinch!

I had a s similar experience at aa HI-FI and audio fair in Harrogate in the 70''s I thiink the kit was quite high end, Nakamichi IIRC. The key was to listen on headphones and the more dynamic the better (big cans), The two demos I heard were the walking around one, in this case a  female coming up and wispering in an ear, and a recording of Concorde taking off recorded on the runway at Heathrow..

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It seems to be the shape of the ear and the ear canal  that allows you to determine where a sound comes from in three dimensions, i.e. up and down as well.as left and right. Some years ago after I had picked up a chest infection that spread to my sinuses, it affected my spatial sound  location, so that a sound coming from directly in front of me at the same level,  appeared to be coming from around 45° left and and 20°  upwards. Normal service was restored when the infection cleared up! 

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With binaural recordings like the "walk-around" one it's easy to tell where the sound is coming from so long as it's slightly off to one side or the other. It is difficult to tell whether it's directly in front or behind because both ears see the same signal, all you can rely on for localisation is that sounds to the rear are more muffled -- this was well known when binaural recordings were all the rage many years ago, and having tried this test then (on decent headphones) I can confirm it, I was a bit of a hi-fi nut in those days...

 

Barn owls avoid this problem by having their left and right ears at different levels, but I can't see this catching on for people -- both because of the surgery involved and the problems getting headphones to fit... 😉

 

(plus the binaural recordings would have to be made with a lopsided dummy head, and then they wouldn't work for non-surgically-enhanced listeners...)

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