Throwback Post : Bianural Audio

First time I got excited about binaural audio was I think in 2005. I’ll admit I had never heard of it before! It was my first year at the music school back in Istanbul set out to study Music Technology and Composition, and a few geeky friends and I have discovered what back then fascinated and puzzled us, holophonic recordings! Also known as the match-box recordings. It wasn’t called binaural per se, in fact the supposed argument was that it was a whole different recording/post-processing technique that went beyond traditional binaural recordings… It still puzzles me to some extent cos I have found no proof/documentation what so ever to shed some light onto this mysterious method.. It’s validity? highly doubtful.

Anyhow, thanks to this ‘holophonic’ recording found online, I started digging into regular(!) binaural recordings. I didn’t have any equipment nor have I had the money to buy anything so I was merely a spectator and not so much of a content creator.

Moving forward, a few years later it’s 2009, I am in Utrecht, studying Sound Design, especially interactive audio. Jumping between sound design, sound art, multi speaker works, interactive performances, live electronics, ambisonics, binaural recordings, researching adaptive game audio, playing around with what’s then was just picking up; ‘procedural audio’. It’s a candy shop! Best years of my life!
And I find myself, in a naively ambitious (my fault), all-in-one research project, working on a location based audio game, using binaural audio with head tracking and gps data.. Trying to create this augmented-audio-reality in the form of a game. Tinkering with ambisonic format and realtime binaural rendering for procedurally generated environmental sounds. Mouthful(!)

Moving forward, a few more years later it’s 2012, I am a professional sound designer and artist. Busy making installation art works with my collective and working on my first AAA game audio gig. I haven’t touched ambisonic format or realtime binaural rendering for quite some time. I see VR having a serious leap forward, and along with it so does’3D Audio’ and this time it seems more plausible that it might reach a larger crowd and do not stay in the hidden corners of academic research projects.

My interest is peaked again, especially after seeing all the progress that’s been done with ambisonic – binaural realm. I decide, I’ll take another jab at it!

This post is for me to take that first step back on that boat, and while I’m at it I hope to create a personal creative-research trajectory which I can share with public. I’ll start with putting together a repertoire so I have an overview again in terms of what’s out there. And then I shall see where it takes me this time around.

So…
Next post: Introduction to VR audio and simulating various listening experiences.