Music & Sound: Hear The Difference With Binaural

One of the hottest topics, and the audio trend on most of my peers’ lips, is ‘Binaural’. With the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) and ultimately, the ability to offer consumers an unparalleled level of immersion, it is no shock to hear that we will soon see massive changes in post-production sound, in order to exploit the full potentials of these new audiovisual experiences.

Everything from recording methods to mixing formats is affected. In a nutshell, binaural recordings pick up sound in the same manner the human ear would. In fact, to make a binaural recording, you stick little microphones to your ears or take a dummy head and place microphones in its ears. Binaural audio recreates a sound field in such a way that the listener perceives it as if they were present when the recording took place. An easy way to think about this is that it is a two channel recording, with enhanced 3D panning and location information – a sort of ‘super stereo’.

The core here is: ‘What’s the consumer and user experience?’ Sometimes it’s made better, often ‘wow’ and, occasionally, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Just Google the words ‘VR project’ and in 80 per cent of cases, you will see this sentence in the first paragraph: “... with an Oculus Rift headset and a pair of headphones”. It doesn’t just say “.... with an Oculus Rift headset”. The point I’m making is that everyone understands how vital a role sound plays in offering immersive, multi-sensory experiences.

You can be sure that there will be multiple different brands of headphones optimised for VR. This alone will be a fantastic leap for sound, as the power of sound is often taken for granted and insufficiently utilised in the creative industries. Which in turn leaves out a powerful creative tool. With the advent of VR, you see the opposite. Sound is at the core, bringing a silent dull VR world to life.  Don’t believe me? Try VR without sound. Sound is an inseparable part at the heart of the experience, playing an essential role in creating something that is truly convincing and immersive. To quote the chief scientist at Oculus, Michael Abrash: “It’s not an addition - it’s a multiplier.” The VR experience depends on convincing audio in order to fully immerse the user.

So what is ‘convincing audio’? Convincing audio is that which matches the visual experience. Just as out-of-sync audio sucks, so out-of-location audio just does not cut it in VR. If a bee buzzes, near to your right ear, it takes a couple of additional microseconds for the buzz to reach the left. In addition, the buzzing will also be louder in one ear than the other. If you consider the manner in which the brain scans these tiny inter-aural variations of time and loudness, in order to localise sound with pristine precision, you’ll understand that making ‘convincing audio’ is rather essential in creating multi-sensory experiences.

Complete audience immersion is, of course, attractive to savvy marketers as it fosters the potential for brands to engage with a consumer who is giving them their undivided attention. It goes without saying that if you give the audience as rich an experience as possible, the more likely it is you’ll hold their attention. This is great but it also carries enhanced dangers for advertisers. If we thought the loudness wars in the TV ad breaks were a pain, then, with VR’s capability to scare the living daylights out of the consumer, a whole new world of issues is about to open up.

This new world of audio is a once in a lifetime event. It is going to make the coming years a very exciting and interesting time to be working in audio post-production, but never believe stereo is going away. My colleagues at GCRS have been investigating and experimenting with every aspect of the binaural recording and its playback ‘perception’ process, to gain an in-depth understanding of its true potential. All that’s left for me to say is that it’s probably time you invested in a nice new pair of headphones.