How is THIS done?

grn said:
the thing is, you can never really get how it sounds when something is in front of you because of the way your face absorbs the sound and the way your ears/brain processes that. the matchbook examples wasn't really that great. it seemed just left and right to me and sort of 'behind' me, that's about it. far away only because of the room sound.

with the woman it kind of felt like she was walking behind me, but not really.
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did you listen with headphones though? that's the key
i don't know, I can totally hear it when I listen.
 
I loved 'Brainstorm'

Chris Walken before he became addicted to cowbell. :D

That's always been how I wanted to die. ;)
 
holy crap... that was one of the creepiest audio experiences ive ever had...weird as hell.. i want it.

i dont remember who said it, but i second them - how can we do this without spending 5k?
 
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yeah I listened with headphones, it really wasn't all that great. it was just left fading to right and room ambience as far as I am concerned.
 
grn said:
yeah I listened with headphones, it really wasn't all that great. it was just left fading to right and room ambience as far as I am concerned.
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then your ears are broken :p

i challenge you to try and replicate it then. if it's just a simple panning/fading and room ambience, then it shouldn't be too hard for you to recreate up/down/side/around movements
 
The shortfall with binaural recording is that you can't distinguish front from back. In other words, something that's in front of the head could easily be in back of the head, and it would sound the same either way. No problem, though, with up/down or side/side imaging, obviously.

This hologram recording, on the other hand, comes much, much closer to the front and back thing. If you really listen, you can tell the guy lighting the match is walking around in back of you most of the time ... and towards the end, starts encircling you clockwise. The cool part is that you can clearly hear the transition when he goes from back to front ... which is a noticeable step forward from binaural recordings.

.
 
It works better on closed-ear headphones. Some crappy ipod phones don't do it justice. Use a reference studio grade set.
 
grn said:
my ears are broken :(
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Don't crank up your headphones too loud. Set them so it's close to natural sounding, volume wise. Try closing your eyes. You should most certainly be able to tell when the matches go from behind you to your front, even with "cheaper" phones. I sampled it thru my cheap-ass skype headset, and I had no problems hearing it.
 
I had a professor who is an electro-acoustic composer, and she could do this. Trust me, it's even better in a concert hall through Genelecs.

I have repeatedly asked her how it is achieved, and have been repeatedly rejected with the answer "It would take two to three hours to explain how to do it". She did say, however, that it is a combination of EQ and reverb.

Without any disrespect to her, I must say that I think she was avoiding answering my question because she knows how cool that stuff sounds and wants to keep that info under wraps.

Gads!

I'll start hunting, and if I get any info from her I'll be happy to pass it along.
 
The first time I listened to it, it never occured to me to use headphones. But even on the c.c.s (crappy computer speakers), it sounded pretty cool. I listened to the matchbook again today with phones and holy crap. freaky cool.

Now my question is, when is somebody gonna develop a non-human dummy head for binaural recording (which apparently is different than this holophonic deal)? For instance we could all experience what a rattled matchbook sounds like to a raccoon, or a pitbull?
 
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