Saturday, December 10, 2005
09:03 PM
Holophonic Sound / 3D audio with just two speakers: "
I’m not your average home audio enthusiast. I’m one of a rare breed—an imaginary home audio enthusiast. That is to say, I know all about the technology behind stereo equipment, Surround Sound, Dolby, THX, and all those other impressive-sounding names; I have a respectable CD collection; I have forsworn analog audio and video; and I know exactly what my home theater setup would look like…if I had one. There are imaginary speakers all around my living room, wired to an imaginary amplifier, tuner, CD changer, and digital media receiver; these nicely complement my imaginary widescreen plasma TV. The problem is not knowing what I want, how to hook it up, or where to put it; the problem is that my cheap TV and boom box reproduce sound adequately, and I have not yet convinced myself that my music-listening or DVD-watching experience would be enough better with thousands of dollars of audio equipment to justify the cost. Of course, it’s also a problem that what my imagination says is adequate to provide the ideal listening environment changes as technology improves.
When I was a kid, the term High Fidelity still meant something—it set apart audio equipment that had been deliberately engineered for faithful sound reproduction and a high signal-to-noise ratio from cheaper, cruder devices. At a certain point, though, pretty much everything was considered ‘Hi-Fi’; the new buzzword was stereo. Having equipment and recordings with two discrete channels of audio—conveniently matching the average number of human ears—was seen as the new sign of audio competence. Then there was the shift from the analog world of tubes, tapes, and vinyl to the digital world of microprocessors and CDs, a new standard of audio quality. And now we’re into a new phase: an increasing number of carefully positioned speakers and subwoofers to simulate the 360° audio field of the cinema.
For Those Who Have Ears to Hear…
The curious thing, though, is that while the number of speakers in the typical living room has increased, the number of ears on the typical head has not. Humans somehow have the ability to locate the source of a sound spatially with only two inputs; even with a single ear, most people can pinpoint the direction a sound is coming from. Crucially, this sound-locating ability is not restricted to a single plane; we can also determine if a sound is coming from above, below, or anywhere in between. No home audio system I’ve ever seen (or heard) addresses the Z axis (up and down)—and neither, for the most part, do cinemas; the only way to experience truly 3D sound artificially is to go into a special environment such as San Francisco’s Audium where speakers are physically placed above, below, and all around you.
If humans can determine the location of a sound anywhere around them with just two ears, it’s reasonable to imagine there must be some way of reproducing spatially accurate sound with just two speakers. But what’s the trick? What can ears and brains do that microphones and speakers can’t?
The Ears Have It
A large part of what enables people to identify the position of a sound is attributable to the hardware—the unique shape of the ear folds and ear canal. Because sounds coming from one direction will be reflected and channeled into the ear canal with slightly different characteristics than sounds coming from another direction, the brain is able to use these subtle clues to unconsciously create a mental picture of where the sound must have originated. While sophisticated digital signal processing equipment can add depth and spatial separation to a stereo signal, there’s a much different and older approach to solving the problem: a method of recording known as binaural audio. A binaural recording is made with two microphones and a two-track recorder, just as a stereo recording would be. The difference is that the microphones are placed inside a dummy head—shaped just like a human head, complete with rubbery ears, sinus cavities, and so on. The microphones are right where the eardrums would be, so the signal they pick up is much closer to what ears would hear. The resulting recording—always most effective when heard through headphones—produces a vastly more accurate spatial rendition than would be achieved by using a pair of conventional microphones.
A well-executed binaural recording can sound shockingly realistic, even if the sound quality itself is not pristine. But binaural recording is appropriate only for live recordings; it’s also inconvenient, expensive (some pro-quality dummy heads retail for over US$8,000), and, frankly, just plain weird—all of which, along with the fact that you need to listen through headphones for maximum impact, helps to explain why you don’t encounter such recordings very often.
Hooked on Holophonics
But there’s a clever, patented variation on binaural recording that claims to go far beyond the simple microphones-in-the-dummy-head approach. It’s called holophonic recording, and the realism it produces, especially in the up/down dimension, is uncanny, eerie…even—as a friend of mine likes to say—freakadelic.
Ordinary holograms are produced by mixing reflected laser light with a second beam hitting an object from another angle; the resulting interference pattern of the two waves is what’s actually recorded on film. Expose the film to the same wavelength of light again, and a 3D image emerges from the interference pattern. Italian inventor Hugo Zuccarelli wondered whether a similar process could be used to record sounds, since after all, sound waves can form interference patterns with each other just as light waves can. His holophonic process starts with a type of binaural dummy head, but it reportedly records the interference pattern formed by mixing the sound with an inaudible, digitally superimposed reference signal. Zuccarelli believes that the human auditory apparatus, when listening to sounds, adds the same signal to the input, effectively decoding the interference patterns previously recorded. All that may sound like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo—and Zuccarelli certainly has detractors who claim ‘holophonic’ sound is nothing more than binaural with maybe a few bells and whistles. All I can say is: hearing is believing. The holophonic recordings I’ve heard are simply remarkable—much more impressive than conventional binaural recordings—but I encourage you to listen for yourself and form your own opinion.
There is, of course, a little snag. As with all binaural recordings, holophonic sounds lose most of their spatial characteristics when played through ordinary speakers (though Zuccarelli has designed a special speaker system that enables holophonic sounds to be appreciated even outdoors by a large audience). As things stand now, you won’t be able to enjoy a holophonic soundtrack on your home theater system—no matter how many speakers it has—unless you and everyone else watching the film wear headphones. Nevertheless, a number of recording artists, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Pink Floyd, have employed holophonic technology in recordings or concerts, and it has also been featured in both films and commercials. Holophonic sound may be slow to catch on as a mainstream technology, but it’ll make your iPod sit up and go ‘Wow.’—JK
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First things first: You need to hear some holophonic recordings. I must remind and urge you to listen to these through headphones; the effect really is lost with ordinary speakers. The best individual samples of holophonic recordings (and the Holophonics.com Web site) have disappeared over the past year or so for unknown reasons. You can still find some decent samples (apparently made using a slightly different technique, which is not quite as convincing as Zuccarelli’s) at Holophonic {beyond the sound}. (Click the TEST holo-sound link, and then, in the pop-up window, click the links [in Italian].) This site appears to have several CDs (see their store page), but as far as I can tell they only ship to customers in Europe. The 10-CD Dimension Sound Effects Library, which features holophonic recordings, costs about $500 and is available from Nightingale Music and Sound Ideas. There’s also this recording, available only on LP.
Zuccarelli’s official Web site also disappeared at some point in the last year. For an overview of holophonic sound, see ‘What Is Holophonic Sound?’ at Sound Ideas.
Other articles about Zuccarelli and his work can be found at BioWaves or HaBi 2.
SPECIAL NOTE: According to reader Geno Andrews, Zuccarelli originally made 5 ‘head’ microphones. A producer friend of his in Italy has one of them available for sale; contact geno@genoandrews.com for details.
Interested in binaural recording generally? See an excellent FAQ for Beginners at Binaural Source, and download lots of sample binaural recordings from Duen Hsi Yen’s Binaural, 3D, Holographic Sound Page. And that $8,000 binaural dummy head? Check out the Neumann KU100.
If you really want all the messy details about how the human ear hears ‘holophonically,’ see the paper Decoding the Source Information by Dichotic Hearing by A. Illényi of the G. Békésy Research Laboratory for Acoustics, Technical University Budapest. To learn more about the recording apparatus, see Zuccarelli’s patent (which, I should point out, only covers his process for creating the ‘dummy head’ microphone assembly, not the recording process itself)—it’s #4,680,856.
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(Via Interesting Thing of the Day.)
Bereaved by the forces of nature and discovered by wildlife rangers near certain death in the Indian Ocean off Malindi, the one-year-old male hippo calf dubbed Owen was on 27 December 2004 placed in Haller Park, a wildlife sanctuary in the coastal city of Mombassa, Kenya.
According to Frank Costanza, the Festivus celebration includes three major components:
The Cryptomundo correspondent, a 27-year-old gentleman, Frederick B. Gerwig, sends along this information in his initial email to me earlier this week: 'Here is a picture that my father’s wildlife camera (motion activated) took around 12/07/05. We are not sure what it is, but it doesn’t look human. It very well could be a hunter or something, however, my father’s property is posted and this is a wildlife feeding site approximately 400 yards from their Braxton County, WV home. The proportions seem very strange as compared to those of a human. It is possible that it is low light distortion, but it seems very curious. Sorry the picture is so small. The camera he uses is somewhat low tech to prevent theft as it stays stationed at this location all the time until he picks it up to download and review the pictures on his PC. Let me know what you think…we are baffled by this image.'
Apparently the smaller fish was caught on Tannum's shark lines.
