Binaural mixing? (Kim...maybe you could help? :)

[metafex]

Ok...so a friend posted a thread on another forum saying that he had heard a binaural mix, where the sounds appeared to be OUTSIDE of the headphone listening field.

He went to explain attempting something in a 5.1-esque kind of way, but the results did not pan out.

So...I was wondering, does anyone have any insight/information/resources on HOW to attempt such a thing?

***
This was part of the thread, just to localize the idea
***

When I put the headphones on, my first reaction was "oh lol, the audio is coming from the monitors and not the speakers!"
I took the headphones off to make the adjustment and the sound went away.

It was literally UNREAL. I would SWEAR the piano was 4-5 feet off to my left, that the snare drum was at the back of the room, that the brass was in a clump over on the right, and that (oddly) the banjo was higher up than everything else.

KEVAR dummy heads, which were used to make this particular recording, are expensive, and besides offer only limited solutions for the recording of a real sound in a real space. I want to be able to MIX with this craziness.

Of course, there are quite a few high-quality "Virtual Surround" boxes out there; they read Dolby or other surround encodes, and rather than decode the streams to a speaker setup, convolve the audio with certain HRTF processes to make the listener believe the audio is coming from a speaker array. This is common for gamers and movie fans, but why not music? After all, 5.1 music is becoming the new fad, but not many listeners have capable 5.1 setups. Nearly ALL, though, have headphones...

So the thought occurs: why not make surround mixes FOR headphones? the technology is obviously capable. But of course, I don't want to stop there. I want the FULL range of stereo field, and that includes the "within the head" range of traditional headphone stereo. Binaural mixes boast the space they provide, but what if you don't WANT space? What if I want my guitars 4 feet out in front and on either side, and I want my drum overheads to be literally OVERHEAD (though of course this steps outside the realm of traditional 5.1 mixing and into true ambisonic stuff)... but I want the vocal directly between the ears, along with the kick and bass?

So...what say you great kvrians?

[Winstontaneous]

I haven't made any mixes like this but I do find the subject intriguing.

Some of the things I've come across are:

http://musicformaniacs.blogspot.com/200 ... sound.html
a demonstration of "holophonic sound" using headphones

http://www.hauptmikrofon.de/theile/Theile_DAFX.PDF
A technical paper that's quite accessible - about using "Wave Front Synthesis" for virtual spatialization

Not sure if this next one is directly relevant but I was fascinated by this article on "Time Reversed Acoustics" in Scientific American when I read it 10 years ago:
http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?f ... D8602B82DD
Basically, about how to record data so a sound is projected back to its spatial source.

[metafex]

thanks for the info winston!

If anyone else has info, keep the postin goin'!

[blacbeard]

Christian Budde makes a VST that mimics Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTF as they are called). It is very simple and works really well. Can be used for special panning functions to achieve binaural results, use as an insert in your mixer to place the instruments wherever you want.

It looks like a head

[Kim Lajoie]

You called?

Binaural recording can produce some pretty amazing results. Unfortunately it only works when listening with headphones - not on speakers. I haven't heard any artificial processes that convincingly re-create the effect of binaural recording (this was a few years ago though). I suspect good results might be had using convolution with appropriate impulses. Of course impulses are static, so you'd require one impulse for each 3D position you want to use and you wouldn't be able to use motion. Perhaps Nebula could overcome this with its impulse interpolation... but I don't know enough about how it works to know if it does a proper morph or just a static crossfade (or even something entirely different). Maybe one day someone will record a collection of impulses with a dummy head and appropriate microphones? That would be interesting.

-Kim.

[metafex]

I realize this is a rather specialized topic. Thank you for the repsonse kim. I know in these parts that your knowledge is rather colossal.