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Music Media

3D Sound by Creator of MP3 166

Posted by michael from the jaws-theme dept.
im333mfg writes "News.com has an article detailing the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology's latest and greatest audio solution, Iosono, or as they're putting it 'true three dimensional audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small sweet spot, perhaps a few feet wide, while the Iosono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.'"
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3D Sound by Creator of MP3 More

3D Sound by Creator of MP3

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  • Please... (Score:5, Funny)

    by extra the woos ( 601736 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:23AM (#9793808)
    Will someone in the porn industry pick this up? I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action.

  • one application springs to mind (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    pimpmobiles. Imagine a car with hundreds of goldplated speakers everywhere..

  • A pizza... (Score:4, Funny)

    by spare.dave ( 678439 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:26AM (#9793822) Homepage
    The first person to tie this to a worldwide conspiracy against OGG gets a pizza.

  • How does this compare to Ambisonics? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Supposedly, "ambisonic" sound is superior to traditional stereo/5.1/7.1 systems and has the added benefit of actually being used in some recordings, so is there any comparison between the two methods?
  • All I need is a Beowulf cluster of those and an obligatory popcorn stand.

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What about farts? Will the theatre shake?

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:00AM (#9794129) Journal
      If you can place a sound anywhere in the theatre then I can imagine a bored sound tech having fun by making a fart sound come from a random audience member...
      • In this case it would be much funnier if the bored sound tech injected a sound after processing, such that it sounds (to everyone in the audience) as if the fart came from one seat to the left or right. :)

        Mal-2

  • 300 speakers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nuggz ( 69912 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:37AM (#9793852) Homepage
    To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400.

    Not very surprising that 300 speakers will give you a better surround experience.

    • Re:300 speakers? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:39AM (#9793861)
      Which also means this technology will work in 0% of today's theaters without retrofitting, and will likely never be sold at the consumer level.

      Nice idea... but I don't think this one's getting off the chalkboard.
      • And why wouldn't cinemas pay to retrofit it? Let's face it, the only real advantage cinemas currently offer over a decent home A/V set is that they show films that you can't (legally) get at home for another 2 months. Furthermore, if you live in the UK and have at least two mates, you can often buy the region 1 DVD of a film only recently released at the cinema for less than actually going to the cinema as a group. You also don't get ripped off on paying for your coke and popcorn and you don't have to put u

        • Re:300 speakers? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jim Starx ( 752545 )
          Cinemas need to do something to add to the film experience, and preferably do something that the consumer will not be able to afford for a considerable amount of time.

          Like having a giant screen to show the movie on??

          • Just about anybody who wants to watch more than twenty movies, with the theaters' inflated prices of popcorn and child care (if the parents believe the kids too young for PG-13 or R), should be able to afford at least a cheap DLP projector.

      • Ah, the nice thought of fitting 300 speakers into my room (a'la THX 3 or whatever).. :) *Not!*
      • They don't say what type of cabinet these speakers will have? I imagine that dozens of coils could fit in a plane- type enclosure, in an array. So you might only have to fit five or six enclosures, hung on the wall like picture frames. One of the pictures seems to bear this out, it does look like flat arrays.
    • Not better- just more people experience what people with 5 or even 2 speakers can already experience by themselves
      • 2 speakers doesn't give you surround sound.
        • Have you ever heard a great two speaker system?

          You will feel as if you are right there with the band / orchestra. As long as I only have two ears, I only need two speakers.
          • Obviously you've never heard a great surround sound system. Seriously though, your ears can tell when things are behind you, above you, etc. Stereo can simulate some of that, but not perfectly.
          • There's only one right place to sit with two speakers to have any chance of getting the proper stereo experience. The point of the new 3D sound is that the entire audience in an auditorium can got proper 3D sound. There are lots of pairs of ears in different places, and two speakers alone are certainly not enough to take account of that. Also, two speakers are not enough for proper surround sound unless you are not only sitting equidistant from the two speakers (both pointing straight at you) but also ke

    • Re:300 speakers? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Small speakers. This is the audio equivalent of holograms. If you want to read more about it, the proper search term is "wavefield synthesis".
    • Would you rather pay $1000 for 6 big speakers, or $1000 for 500 smaller speakers?

      If the cost of the new system is competetive and the sound is better, people will buy it.

      Now if that work on the complexity of wiring in 500 speakers. Maybe WiFi to the speakers? Add a 3 position thumbwheel on the back of each speaker to alow 10^3 possible encryption patterns and interference with your neighbor would be resolved...as would people sniffing your pr0n.
    • *sometimes* *as many as* 300 or 400

      AFAIK the minimum was about 50 (a good deal of the bigger cinemas have that many (generally about 10 larger speakers at the sides with a great number of small ones around and between them) even if they can't be controlled independently.)

      Now despite having that many speakers you still have the sweet spot problem and that's where the wave field synthesis comes in. You replicate the real wave field of a sound (or emulate a bigger distance between the 5,6,7 channels you have

  • Phased array sound (Score:5, Informative)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:38AM (#9793855)
    The article says "To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be...". This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited [1limited.com] have been using from some years to deliver true surround sound from a flat panel speaker.
    • This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using ...

      Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way.

      The key issue seems to be that as you progress from just a few point sources to hundreds, you're no longer just approximating a fully distributed source but you're actually starting to implement one physically. Once you accept that that's what you're doing, then you should stop thinking about "number of speakers" an
      • Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way. .. and your background which qualifies you do judge in this issue is?? I think the guys at the Fraunhofer institute know very well what they are doing.

        • and your background which qualifies you do judge in this issue is??

          I think he's going on common sense. But if that's not good enough for you I work in a recording studio and I think it's a stupid idea. I mean, it's cool to do the research and try out diffrent things, but it's certainly not the latest and greatest thing in audio.

    • Of course, the 1 limited technology is a cheesy hack and produces bad sound according to all that have heard it. Bouncing sound off a way to create spaciousness is not clever as walls are not good acoustic mirrors.

      This new technique sounds like a joke - a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. 400 speakers just to get a little "better" sound for a movie?? I'm sorry, but cinema sound sucks at the moment with it's boomy thud bass and with crappy movies that think wooshing sounds around the cinema is "clev

    • You're absolutely right that this is not a new idea, and research has been conducted for other types of solutions, as well, including one technology that might hit the public someday that will essentially beam your own private audio stream, tailored to your exact 3d audio needs, directly to your own ears, even in a crowded theater.

      I say beam, because it's actually a very concentrated, narrow band of audio, much like a laser is a concentrated, narrow band of light. I personally don't understand how that t

    • The fraunhoffer system requires 300-400 speakers. If you have that many speakers in a room, you don't need phased array techniques to make the sound come from a particular location ... all you need is a glorified speaker switch.

  • (Submarine) patents? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by art6217 ( 757847 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:40AM (#9793864)
    Is not this the same institute that had the submarine MP3 patents? I might be wrong and their work is probably very interesting, but obvious "patents" might perhaps turn it into another GIF/MP3/...-like story.

    Byt the way, anyone knows how is it related to this: Single Speaker Unit Delivers Surround Sound [slashdot.org]?

    • Re:(Submarine) patents? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by danila ( 69889 )
      As much as I despise patents, it's not like they prevented GIF and MP3 formats from being widely used. It doesn't sound too bad when patents are used not to prevent competition, but to get back some of the money you spent on research.

      • Re:(Submarine) patents? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by treat ( 84622 )
        As much as I despise patents, it's not like they prevented GIF and MP3 formats from being widely used. It doesn't sound too bad when patents are used not to prevent competition, but to get back some of the money you spent on research.

        So what you're saying is that you're OK with the law if everyone is free to break it?

      • The base MP3 patent is much broader than just what is needed "to get back some of the money they spent on research". They patented compressing (using any kind of algorithm) sound, as long as you do it in a loop that involves an entropic encoder (such as Huffman encoding), until the sample reaches the desired bitrate and if you store the result together with the bitrate afterwards (or send it over a network).
    • Byt the way, anyone knows how is it related to this: Single Speaker Unit Delivers Surround Sound?

      Not at all related. These two approaches are the exact opposites of each other. The system in your link uses a couple speakers all eminating from approximately the same position and psychoacousticly tricks you into thinking its surround. This system actually places a ton of speakers around you and creates a surround enviornment. At the moment this system probably sounds better because research into psychoa

    • Is not this the same institute that had the submarine MP3 patents?

      Yes, it is.

      I might be wrong and their work is probably very interesting, but obvious "patents" might perhaps turn it into another GIF/MP3/...-like story.

      You are wrong. This is not a technology that everybody will use in a few years, only to pay Fraunhofer licence fees.
      We are speaking of 300-400 speakers here, carefully adjusted, spread over the space of big cinemas. If this technology ever gets used, there will be a handful of companie

  • Hologram (Score:4, Insightful)

    by femto ( 459605 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:40AM (#9793865) Homepage
    I sounds like an audio hologram. What's so great about that?

    No doubt they have taken patents out, despite audio holograms being described in a speech at Dennis Garbor's 1971 Nobel prize ceremony [nobel.se]. Presumably there are papers out there dating from 1950 as well.

    People have also been using computers to generate holograms for years, so the algorithms can hardly be new.

  • Wonder how long before someone hacks the output to include a buzzing mosquito... :-) Also, presumably the underlying stuff was done years ago at somewhere (say IRCAM in France)??

    • More on Origins of Wave Field Synthesis ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by foobsr ( 693224 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @08:22AM (#9793991) Homepage Journal
      While IRCAM says:

      Huyghens' Principle
      To illustrate Huyghens' principle, let us consider a simple example. A rock (or primary source) thrown in the middle of a pond generates a wave front that propagates along the surface. Huyghens' principle indicates that an identical wave front can be generated by simultaneously dropping an infinite number of rocks (secondary sources) along any position defined by the passage of the primary wave front. This synthesized wave front will be perfectly accurate outside of the zone delimited by the secondary source distribution. The secondary sources therefore act as a "relay", and can reproduce the original primary wave front in absence of a primary source!

      Origins of Wave Field Synthesis
      Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is based on a series of simplifications of the previous principle. The first work to have been published on the subject dates back to 1988 and is attributed to Professor A.J. Berkhout of the acoustics and seismology team of the Technological University of Delft (T.U.D.) in Holland. This research was continued throughout the 90's by the T.U.D. as well as by the Research and Development department of France Telecom Lannion.

      loc. cit. [ircam.fr]

      CC.

  • 300-400 speakers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gotpaint32 ( 728082 ) * on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:43AM (#9793869) Journal
    To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle

    Yes thats right 300-400 speakers, i must say this is downright impractical for all but the most crazed of audiophiles. Interesting and superior technology to whats out there, but sounds like this will go the way of the betamax
    • it wouldnt be impractical if you could buy 'speakers' that had like 100 small speakers in one.

      you know, like pre-assembled rails.

      besides, this tech goes very much against most audiophiles beliefs anyways since they'll believe it'll distort the 'true sound'.
      • besides, this tech goes very much against most audiophiles beliefs anyways since they'll believe it'll distort the 'true sound'.

        What are you on about? 'True sound'?? What does that have to do with how many speakers there are? It's the quality of the speakers that counts, not the number.

  • So do they hand you your headphones... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:43AM (#9793870) Journal
    So do they hand you your headphones when you first enter the theatre (thus dooming you to a particular seat), or after you sit down?


    Once again, we run into an amusing attempt to get around a fundamental limit in human perception... We have two ears, and our skin can detect (with almost no dicriminatory ability) strong low-frequency sound. Two channels plus the bass.

    So why do research groups like Dolby and Fraunhofer keep coming out with new ideas like this "3d" sound? More channels (given an encoding that can make use of them) just adds degrees of freedom to where someone can sit (ie, expands the "sweet" spot) and get decent quality sound - At the expense of more, higher-quality speakers, various sound dampening and/or reflecting materials, architectural considerations, etc. Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.
    • They are into it because they don't have any future products if they don't develop something.

      The way that the ear does 3d is the odd shape of the ear absorbs different frequencies at different levels depending on the direction of the sound. The brain seems to have the ability to understand that a fraction of a drop in nearby frequences means the sound is at a specifc angle. Whats even stranger is that the mapping must be dynamic since pets use it and some animals can detect elevation of sounds to a few d
    • We only have two ears. But those two ears can pinpoint an audio source with around 3 degrees accuracy plus distance. That's x,y and z axis for you.

      A 2 speaker setup will provide 1 axis. There's algorithms to shape sound like the ear would hear it from a 3D source, but that's not quite the real thing due to physical limitations.

      That's why they keep coming out with new ideas.

      And this system is better than handing out headphones because:
      a) Cost of 300-400 quality headphones
      b) Uncomfortable for many people
      c
      • But those two ears can pinpoint an audio source with around 3 degrees accuracy plus distance.

        Our ears don't work with *true* 3 degrees of accuracy. There's only two sensors, so it's impossible to, anyway!

        They work by some complex post-processing by our brain -- slight differences in the frequencies and phase relationships of sounds as they appear and move around our head are interpreted as coming from different angles, as our ears' strange shapes filter sounds directionally. But it can be fooled.

        A 2-spe
        • Only 2 sensors? The inner ear contains an array of sensors called nerve cells. And the outer and middle ear are rather elaborate waveguiding constructions. Ears are far more sophisticated constructions than a microphone and catch more than just 2D information.
        • A 2-speaker headphone can easily re-create a full spherical sound field....

          That's abselutely false. The technology has been progressing in that direction, but it is by no means easy, and it certainly doesn't sound anywhere as good as if the sound were truely 3 dimentional. Everyone's ears are diffrent, like fingerprints. That means that everyones brain decodes the signal in a slightly diffrent way. Technology is getting close at being able to simulate 3 dimentional sound from a 2 point source, but it

    • Re:So do they hand you your headphones... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PenguiN42 ( 86863 ) <taylork@alum.mit . e du> on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:33AM (#9794263) Journal
      Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.

      Ah, but headphones can only easily position sound relative to your head's position and orientation -- whereas this room wafefront synthesis system positions sound relative to the *room*. A sound 50 feet behind the right wall will sound 50 feed behind the right wall to a listener no matter where they are sitting in the theater and no matter which way they're looking.

      To emulate this with headphones, you'd need some sort of position/orientation tracking system on each pair of headphones. So now the question is, which is more complex: hundreds of fixed speakers playing phase-synchronized sounds in a coordinated fashion, or hundreds of individual headphone units with tracking devices each playing one version of the virtual "source" material customized for each listener?
      • Actually, it's not that bad with all the headphones. One reason is that now that everyone has their own headphone, they can customize it however they like it. Different people have different hearing curves, and may want to boost different frequencies. Some people might prefer softer sounds while others may want louder ones. You can probably fit a DSP easily into a headset that can do HRTF's, motion detection and custom equalization and maybe even allow the customers to buy prepackaged audio shapers (lik

      • Re:So do they hand you your headphones... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:51AM (#9794343) Homepage Journal
        Ah, but headphones can only easily position sound relative to your head's position and orientation -- whereas this room wafefront synthesis system positions sound relative to the *room*.

        Is this really what someone watching a film wants? This technology might be cool for theme events etc but when you are in the cinema you are sitting in one position and not moving around. I myself as a film goer would prefer to know that wherever i sat in the auditorium i'd be getting the same experience as everyone else. And from a movie producers point of view id want everyone who saw my film to have an equal experience.

        when you are watching something on a movie screen you want the audio relative to the movie ; what you are watching. Not to the room in which you are watching.

        • I'd go one further -

          I actually find surround sound pulls me out of the movie experience. When I'm watching a movie and I hear a sound from behind me it pulls my awareness out of the film, back into the room in which I'm sitting and makes me thing, "Oh, they're using surround sound...". Is this the typical experience?
      • Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.

        Ah, but headphones can only easily position sound relative to your head's position and orientation -- whereas this room wafefront synthesis system positions sound relative to the *room*. A sound 50 feet behind the right wall will sound 50 feed behind the right wall to a listener no matter where they are sitting in the theater and no matter which way they're looking.

        The (o
    • If I understand you correctly, you are saying that we have 2 ears, so we can only hear in 2 directions?

      I know if an object is 6' from me producing a 1000khz tone. If that same object is moved, I can tell where it is moving to without looking. If it moves to 10' or to 2', I can tell that too.

      Yes, headphones can produce the same effects. But they remove the ambience from the movie theatre experience.
      • If I understand you correctly, you are saying that we have 2 ears, so we can only hear in 2 directions?

        Nope, although you don't seem like the only one to have gotten that impression, so perhaps I phrased myself poorly...

        Our outer and middle ears modify incoming, 4d sound (4d because sound doesn't consist of a single pressure sampling, nor does our response to repeated stimuli remain constant) in a rather complicated way. But no matter how impressive that filtering (and our brain's later interpretation
    • Head-related transfer functions only works on one person at a time, and falls apart if the listener is looking in a direction not expected by the mix.

      People keep arguing that only stereo + sub is necessary, but almost always, they completely forget that is only for the small group that is sitting in the sweet spot, which is usually only a few percent of the room's floor area. Some people watch alone or with a very small crowd, but it falls apart the closer you fill the room. 5.1 allows people to be seate

  • I don't speak German (Score:4, Informative)

    by phantasma6 ( 799340 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:44AM (#9793872)
    you insensitive clod...

    Wouldn't it be better if the main thing contained a link to the English part of the site rather than the German? http://www.iosono-sound.com/eng/index.html [iosono-sound.com]

  • I know this (Score:3, Informative)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:44AM (#9793873)
    This can already be done with headphones anyway, using cards like SB Live (I think) and Aureal Vortex [dansdata.com] cards. Not good for cinema though, but for computer audio, it would work fine.

  • prior work (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dekeji ( 784080 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:47AM (#9793879)
    The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here [ircam.fr]).

    However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.

    Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.

  • re: "I can't wait to download" (Score:3, Funny)

    by nusratt ( 751548 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:48AM (#9793884) Journal
    "I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action."

    If YOU are right in the middle of the action, then it can possibly be convincing. ;-)

  • re: "phased array" (Score:3, Informative)

    by nusratt ( 751548 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @07:59AM (#9793909) Journal
    "This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited [1limited.com] have been using from some years"

    Phased array speakers were introduced approx 30 years ago by Dahlquist.

  • Won't someone think of the phase! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't this going to turn into a phasey mess? The beaming effects and reflections off walls from all those speakers is going to trash music.
  • Anyone knows if/how the surrond using typical 4/6 speaker sets could be done better using some of the advanced sound wave interference algorithms? Even in a small `fine spot'?
  • But the quantum leap in experience results when creative sound mixing takes advantage of the new capabilities of the technology. Footsteps could come down the centre aisle of the theatre, bubbles might emerge under audience seats...

    Eww, really?

  • they musta mist it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thehomeland ( 750151 ) <mike&thehomeland,org> on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:09AM (#9794172) Homepage
    I believe the audiobook of Steven King's "The Mist" did this a number of years ago, in at least 1995 or earlier? All it required was one set of headphones and you could hear a fly buzzing around your ear or could practically see someone walk past you if you closed your eyes.
    • I had a demo tape sent to me years ago promoting a new 3D sound technology, that was really quite amazing and I haven't seen it implemented anywhere. At the time, I think they were negotiating with the makers of Jurassic Park to use their sound technology, but I don't know if it happened or not. This demo tape was amazing though.. A guy talks to you from various points and distances, then suddenly right behind you whispering into your ear (freaked my buddy out when I showed him, he whipped the headphones of
    • try and find a copy of cyborgasm
      click here for amazon [amazon.com]
      with a good pair of headphones, it's a very surreal and believable 3-d audio experience..
    • That's done, via a binaural recording. It's doesn't work in the same fashion as the speaker array described here.

  • What's it gonna cost me? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnemotronic ( 586021 ) <mnemotronic.gmail@com> on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:12AM (#9794186) Homepage Journal
    Fraunhofer Gesellschaft IIS has a history of defending their IP (MPEG 1 audio layer 3 e.g. MP3). As most /.-ers know, MP3 decoder licensing is free, but a "commercial" encoder will cost ya (licensing info [fraunhofer.de]). I wonder what the scam will be for losono.....
  • Ok, I get how the WFS works to generate wave fronts that look like they came from various points behind (or even in front of) the speaker array.

    But according to this site [ircam.fr]:

    " Virtual point sources situated in front of the loudspeaker array. An extension of the WFS principle allows the synthesis of sources within the listening area at positions where no physical sources are actually present. These "sound holograms" are created when a wave front created by the loudspeaker array converges onto a fixed positio
    • as far as i can envision given my knowldedge of acoustics and human spatial auditory perception, there wouldn't be an accurate way to render sounds emanating from sources deep inside the speaker array. did you notice how the nice flash animation on the iozono website shows a sound source from beyond the speaker array?

      let me add another layer of difficulty to the issue:

      the human head is pretty wide if your talking about sound waves. sounds coming from the left of the head reach the left ear first, then

  • Cheaper alternative (Score:5, Informative)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:42AM (#9794295) Homepage Journal
    There is a much cheaper way to do this.
    Simply purchase a polystyrene head (of the sort used for placing wigs and hairpeices)

    Slice down the middle with a hot wire and hollow out the ear canals for two microphones and embed these in the head. Glue back together and jack the trailing leads from your head's "ears" into your favorite recording equipments. And .... Play ...

    It works , its cheap and simple, and best of all no fraunhoffer licensing fee's

    here are some examples (including mp3's) of the technique...

    Binauraul Holophonic Sound [noogenesis.com]

    Nick ...

    • Damn! Where are my mod points when I need them!

      +1 Bad ass!
    • Here is a Wikipedia entry about Binaural Recording [wikipedia.org] for anyone who is interested.
    • All stem from the fact that it needs headphones to work. A big one is that if you turn your head, the image of the sound turns with it, and that sounds wrong. You don't realise it, but you do move your head a little to help with audio cues. You also move it more drasticly for other reasons. Your brain expects that the sonic image it's being presented will change in certian ways when this happens, but with a binaural recording (since it's strapped to your head) it doesn't.

      Another problem is simply the incon
    • Simply purchase a polystyrene head (of the sort used for placing wigs and hairpeices)

      Note, if you're serious about this, you can get heads meant for this purpose. They're denser and have a better HRTF (head-related transfer function).

      If you made your own head from a latex/plaster/foam casting and ballistics gel that might get your close for alot less money, but the cavities would still be wrong.

  • two important points (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Onan The Librarian ( 126666 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @10:45AM (#9794559)
    1. This is Fraunhofer we're talking about here, and they were quite aggressive in ridding the world of those damned pesky free MP3 encoders. This announcement may be news for nerds, but it ain't stuff that matters to the free & open-source community (technically speaking)..

    2. As another post points out, wave field synthesis is hardy a new thing. Marije Baalman demonstrated her recent work at the last Linux audio conference in April, you can check out her implementation of the system at http://gigant.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~baalman/program/in dex.html [tu-berlin.de].
    Cool stuff...
  • So far, the only true sound reproduction without any purity problem that was ever created is monaural. It doesn't have phasing problems, it doesn't have listener's position problems, it doesn't have any problem whatsoever. We know the sound is coming from that column you see there and the sound is pristine, perfect quality.

    Since the 70's, stereophonic sound has made it big. We all know stereo sound is perfect to listen to music. And it truly is. You can immerse yourself in music, be with the musicians. We still have problems with phasing, with distortion, with creating a really good panoramic sound, with filling the room with music, with being able not to pinpoint where the speakers are... these are slowly resolved. We're getting there.

    Then there's the 3-channel surround sound... 4-channel... 5-channel... 6-channel... 7-channel...

    Heck, when I go see a recent movie, I hardly hear the 3rd channel being used. Sometimes with some SFX, sometimes with some bad quality wooshing effect. Some movies will be pointed to me as using that quality I am looking for. What are they? 5 movies over the whole lot?

    Take the latest James Bond. You sometimes hear ambience on the back speakers... ooh big deal.

    And don't speak me about the "walking stick" the ".1" channel is. If the quality was there, we would have 5 real channels of pure full-frequency range sound, including low frequencies.

    So for me, this experiment is precisely that ... an experiment. If it works, it will become another IMAX/OMNIMAX where you need to go to science expos to see carefully selected footage that will give you the maximum sensations and show what it should be in movies.

    And what about the quality of these speakers? I mean, I can barely buy two good speakers at $1000. What about 200? What about all the problems of movie production, sound reproduction, positionning, quality, sound check, ...? When most theaters are not even THX approved and don't plan on be... and when most movies don't really use anything else than left-center-right ... What's the deal?

    Would a movie producer be really interested in making a scene where you hear two actors arriving from the aisles, where you hear them perfectly but don't see them on screen because it would all screw up our small minds, seeing them in front but hearing them to our side? Meh, not so sure!

    Anyways, let's just finish this by saying : Ok, 500 speakers if you want... but start by give me the same quality and use that quality in 5 channels ... and I will start to be interested to 500.

    Mike

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