I think one has to distinguish here various factors.
First of all, if one subtracts the effects of head movements
on perception and also assumes that the listener is
willing to keep their head absolutely still, then
there would seem to be no problem with producing any
sound one cared to at the entrances to the two ear canals.
This will produce if properly done the effect of headphones,
and as I suppose everyone has experienced, headphones
can indeed produce the effect of a fly buzzing around your head
and so on. (cf the "Oscar" experiments of Sennheiser).
However there are two things wrong with this, or maybe more than two.
First of all, in the real world, how the sound changes with hear movements
is very much part of how one hears direction. It is not the only
part of course. If it were, one would not be able(as noted) to hear
the location of a gun shot out of doors since the sound is essentially
instantaneous--no head movement could occur fast enough to matter in
the interval of the sound's arrival.
But head movements still count!
Second thing, almost no one is willing to sit absolutely still.
If you are, Carver's Sonic Hologram solves a lot of your problems!
(Actually I am one of those rare people who likes to sit absolutely
still and I really like the Sonic Hologram, but it is not
exactly a natural experience).
So in practice, all these phase manipulating things that try
to do more with two channel than just make stereo work the way stereo does
work are in the end a failure. When one moves a bit., they go
all phase-y and this is annoying and un-natural.
That being said, a whole generation of people have been brought up
to believe that spaced omni microphoning is spacious and nice.
They have lost completely the idea of what real sound in real space is
like--they have it before them every day, but when they sit down to
listen they change their expectations.
Those people can be sold damn near anything
Robert
On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, dw wrote:
On 08/07/2011 21:40, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
On Fri, Jul 08, 2011 at 02:06:37PM -0600, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote:
The ear canal is just a tube, so there's no
directionality once the waves are in there.
"Once they are in there". Which is why you can make things
work with headphones plus head motion tracking.
When using speakers, the sound has to get 'in there' first.
And you are allowed to turn and otherwise move your head,
so even when e.g. seated you can (and will) explore the sound
field around it, and your brain will correlate your movements
with the changes of the sound entering your ears. So getting
the right sound 'in there' is not just a matter of recreating
the sound field at the two points where your ear canals would
be if your head were clamped into a vise. You have to create
something matching the field of a real source at least in the
near vicinity. And it turns out you can't do that without energy
arriving from more or less the right direction.
Ciao,
One would never be able to locate the source of a gun shot then, since you
don't have time to sample the soundfield.
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