TechStuffIn the late 19th century, a French experiment demonstrated the power of stereo sound. A century later, experiments in binaural audio would help create rich soundscapes that could immerse the listener in audio environments. We learn about the evolution and tech of 3D audio.
I Heart three D Audio. This episode was brought to you in I Heeart three D Audio. To experience more podcasts like this, search for I Heeart three D Audio in the I Heart Radio app. This special three D episode is sponsored by Audible, The Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It, raded R, and World of Warcraft. For maximum effect, headphones are recommended. Welcome to Tech Stuff a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heeart Radio and how the tech are you? So it is President's Day here in the United States as a holiday for us here at my Heart and as such, instead of working, I am vacating or holidaying or something. So we're bringing to you an episode that originally published on May twenty one. It is titled how three D Audio Works. And there is some three D audio shenanigans in this, So if you get creeped out by that kind of stuff, it's good to know going into this. Best listen with headphones on if you're not creeped up by that kind of stuff, and you can enjoy a little bit of the effects as well as learn about the technology I hope you enjoy. Let me tell you a story about my childhood. My family are all really big Disney theme park fans, and growing up in Georgia meant we were just a short eight to ten hour drive from Walt Disney World in Florida. Both of my parents were teachers, and they would save up money so that every two or three years or so we'd make the trip down. Disney World was always where my sister and I wanted to go, even when my parents gently tried to suggest other places like Washington, d C. Or New York City. Nope, we want a Disney World also quick aside, these days, we still will take family trips to Disney World, my parents included, and now with my nieces we get to experience seeing Disney through fresh eyes, which is pretty great. But anyway, back to my story. Back in nine, the Disney Hollywood Studios Park opened for the first time. Back then it was Disney MGM Studios, and the studios were a working studio with films and TV shows shot on the premises. A lot of attractions related to film and TV production. There was the Great Movie Ride, which closed in There was a behind the scenes tour which close in and there were various experiences that taught audiences about stuff like special effects, all of which have closed. Almost leads you to the conclusion that the Hollywood Studios aren't so much the Hollywood Studios anymore. But I'm off track again. One of those experiences was all about sound effects, and it was called the Monster Sound Show. I remember that the attraction featured a clip of a film starring Martin Short and Chevy Chase, and I had a lot of sound effects that played in that movie. Then the attraction host would bring up some audience members to try and create sound effects live on stage using various props while a silent version of the film played, and then they would play the film back again with the new audience supplied fully sound effects in place to great comedic effect. After that presentation, however, you could wander through the rest of the attraction and tucked off to the side were a couple of rooms large enough to hold a few people at a time, and they were called sound stations. Inside those rooms were benches attached to the walls and there were hooks holding headphones. Every couple of feet you would go in, you would sit down, you would put on the headphones, making sure that the headphone with the yellow pad went over your right ear. And then something extraordinary happened. As the lights went down, you were presented with a scenario. You're playing the part of a new executive at the Walt Disney Studios named r. J. McBean. You're told you're sitting behind your executive desk waiting for your assistant Hampton to come in and start off your day, and the sound orbited you. You'd hear the narrator set up the scenario, and her voice drifted from one ear to the other, as if she were actually walking around you while you sat at this fictional desk. And then the scenario would really begin and things got really wild. A little tinker bell jingling would represent the true beginning, and you would hear Hampton come in. He would walk through on a door to your right, and then you'd hear him pontificate as he walks through your office. You would pour a busy drink into a glass of ice, and he introduced you to your secretary. Surely, Oh, and also said you would get a haircut from a stylist named Ken because of course, the big cheese is on his way to meet you, and the haircut sounds in particular were really compelling. You could almost feel the sensation of someone cutting your hair. And I say this as a bald man who hasn't had hair in more than twenty years. Meanwhile, as the hair goes flying, a director called Flavio shows up and pitches a new film to you, complete with using a hair dryer to simulate desert winds. There are a lot of other cute sound effects that follow, like a paper being placed over your head to represent a turban and you can actually find recordings of this piece online, though I will warn you the effects aren't quite up to the quality of the original attraction, which also incorporated stuff like actual blowers to blow warm air on you. Oh and uh, that big cheese who comes in at the end, Well that's Mickey Mouse, of course, he comes into place a pair of mouse ears on top of your head. The whole thing lasted about five minutes and I loved it. And at the end you were instructed to remove your headphones, hang them back on the wall, and exit the room, whereupon you'd head outside to the blazing Florida sun and the wild audio of the real outdoors. That was how I first experienced three D audio. At that time, it was based off a technology that had a brand name of Holophonics. These days, we'd more likely call it binaural audio or maybe just three D audio. And there are a lot of different ways to create the experience, some of which requires special equipment, others that require special software. You can find examples of three D audio in music recordings, amusement park attractions, and stuff like a s MR videos. It can be a really compelling experience and I remember getting goose bumps the first time I encountered it, and depending on who's doing the recording and the effects that they're creating, I can still get goose bumps from it today. Long time listeners might remember that a few years back, I interviewed an a s m R artist named Heather Feather, who was one of a handful of creators who were really making a SMR a phenomenon. Now we have thousands of creators. If you do a search on YouTube for a s m R you will see countless videos in the category. But the technology and psychology behind this experience goes back quite a ways. So I want to explore the evolution and technology behind making three D audio. Now, in the beginning, there was mono, that is monaural or monophonic sound. This sound can come from a single loud speaker, or it could be channeled to multiple loud speakers, but the signal going to each loudspeaker is exactly the same as every other loud speaker. It's effectively a single channel of sound. It's how we do podcasts typically, where you usually will hear the same level of volume in each year. For shows with the multiple hosts, it means that you hear all the hosts in both ears equally. Most listeners tend to prefer that, but very early on people started to experiment with ways to provide more than one channel of sounds simultaneously to a listener to create a different kind of experience. Way back in eight one, when the loud speaker itself was just a few years old, Alexander Graham Bell had patented it in eight seventy six as part of this telephone invention. Well, that's when a man named Clement Adder came up with a clever idea. One of the downsides of live theater is that it is a scarce resource. Only so many people can fit into a theater for a performance, and once that performance is over, it's all done. So there is an element of exclusivity when it comes to live theater, something that remains true because I mean, it's just the limitations of the art. But Adder thought of a way that would help people listen in to say, a performance of an opera, without having to actually go to the opera house. His demonstration involved installing telephone receivers in a few rooms at the Palais de l Industry. The microphones he installed near the footlights at the Grand Opera in Paris, so they were across town. People could come into these rooms at the Palais in small groups and they would hold two receivers, one to each ear. Each receiver connected to a different microphone, which meant the sound they were hearing was actually coming from two different locations. In an article and Scientific American Monsieur Hospitalier is quoted as saying, quote, everyone who has been fortunate enough to hear the telephones at the Palais de l Industry has remarked that in listening with both ears at the two telephones, the sound takes a special character of relief and localization which a single receiver cannot produce end quote. This was a very early and primitive version of stereophonic sound. For those of us who have hearing in both of our ears, we experience the world in stereo. Sound travels at a certain speed. It's three per second if you have an air temperature of around twenty degrees celsius or sixty eight degrees fahrenheit. And yes, the temperature affects how quickly sound will move through the air. And our ears are located upon opposite sides of our noggins. That means that sound hits our two ear drums at slightly different times, depending upon where it's coming from, and we will perceive sound coming from one side of us as being louder in that year than in our opposite ear, and so on. So mono sound shoves all of those sound waves through one channel. Everything is coming out equally through each loudspeaker. Stereo sound, however, changes this up, varying the amplitude or volume of sound in each channel and creating a different effect. While adders demonstration indicated that there was something interesting with producing sound using different channels directed at different loud speakers, that was just the tip of the Iceberg, Alan Dower Bloomline would advance the art considerably in the nineteen thirties. Bloomline was born in three He became an electronics engineer and he worked for the famous Abbey Road Studios, where he pioneered advancements in stereophonic recording. According to an anecdote told by Alan Blumline's son, Simon, Bloomline was at the movies with his wife watching a film and he remarked that were a blind person to go to the movies, they might struggle to follow what was going on because the sound was all coming from loudspeakers. In mono. There was no way to detect through hearing where people were within a scene. Everyone would sound like they were in the same spot. You would only be able to hear if someone was further or closer to a microphone, but otherwise spatially you would have no idea what was going on. And that got him into thinking about developing a system that would allow sound engineers to record and reproduce sound so that had a more localized effect. Action happening on the left side of the screen would be represented by sounds emanating from loudspeakers on the left side of the theater. Likewise, action on the right side would be paired with an appropriate amount of sound coming from the right. Each speaker might produce some of the sound, but at different amplitudes, so that while you might get a little bit of the right hand sound from left hand speakers, the levels would be lower, and the overall feeling would be that you're in the middle of that sound, and it would enhance it's the experience of seeing a movie and as well as help out those who are visually impaired follow what was going on. According to that anecdote, Blumline called it binaural sound, which of course will come back to a bit later in this episode. I just find it interesting that the original term for stereo is one we now associate with a more specific approach to audio recording and production. He would receive more than seventy patents for his various inventions related to stereo sound. He created technology to record, process, and reproduce audio and stereo. In n four, he oversaw a stereo recording of the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Abbey Road Studios. Blumline also pioneered the Blomline method, which would use two microphones mounted at a nine d degree angle with regard to one another to pick up directional sounds in a recording environment. So, in other words, if you think of a room as a square, one might is picking up sounds primarily along the X axis, and the other is picking up sound along the y axis. Bloomline also figured out how to create a stereo groove and a record album. Back in those days, these were made from shell act but they would later be made from vinyl. And when I think about that, I'm astonished. I mean, the way a record player works is that a stylists or needle fits into the groove of a record. That groove causes the stylus to vibrate, and those vibrations transmit to a transducer, which turns the vibrations into an electrical signal thanks to a little electro magnet magic, and that signal then goes to an amplifier, which boosts the signal strength, which then goes on to loudspeakers and powers them so that they can reproduce the original recorded sound that created the groove in the first place. It's the edges of these grooves that caused the vibration or the wiggle of the stylus. So how does one record stereo sound to a physical disc with a groove. Well, imagine a groove that slalom's back and forth in a nice even path. So the waves along either side of the groove are a physical representation of the original sound waves that were recorded. Now, usually in a mono record, you would just see that these waves are evenly distributed on the left and right side. It's like they're in sync with one another. It's just a nice smooth curve. But what if you wanted to record stereo, Well, you could have it where the left side of the groove and the right side of the groove are actually different. The wall on one side would represent the audio recorded in one channel and the wall on the other side of the groove was for the second channel. So, with the proper equipment, you could play this record back and the stylist would vibrate in a very specific way. It would be detected by two sensors connected to the style of us so essentially to transducers, and these two channels of sound could again go to specific loud speakers and left and a right, and then you get stereo playback. It's pretty incredible. Listening back to properly recorded and processed audio would give the listener the sensation that they were actually in an acoustic space. It would feel as though you were standing at the spot where the microphone had been mounted, and that the sound you encounter is just as if you were present at the recording session. That was the intent anyway, but the actual process of getting there is a lot more complicated than setting up just a pair of microphones. When we come back, we'll learn a bit more about stereo recording and editing, and we'll also learn why the Beatles, who also made famous recordings at Abbey Road Studios, concentrated on creating mono records for a long time, even though stereo had been around for decades. But first, let's a quick break. Now. I've done episodes about sound to film in the past, and also sound on television, so I'm going to skip over all of that, Otherwise this episode would be for five hours long. Instead, I want to talk a bit more about stereo recordings and why bands like the Beatles were slow to adopt them. To listen to a stereo recording properly, you need a stereo system. That is, you need a sound system that has at least two loud speakers and a way to send the different channels of sound to both the left and the right speakers or independently to the left and right speakers. Otherwise, the playback would be in mono even if the recording were in stereo, and what you would get is a weird case where some elements of the recording would be really quiet, as those would be the sounds recorded to a channel that wasn't getting picked up by the mono playback system. Now, if you've ever listened to a recording where some of the voices or instruments sound unusually quiet, and that it doesn't sound like this was done on purpose, it's likely because either someone mixed the audio improperly, or it's a stereo recording that at some point got converted over into mono and you're losing some of the audio as a result. Stereo systems were really expensive when they first came out. I'm talking about like stereo systems that you would purchase for your home, and a lot of people, particularly young people, had really purchased record players that had a single speaker incorporated into the player itself. So these were mono playback devices, as there was only one speaker for sound to go. The Beatles, being a band whose music was disproportionately favored by the young, had their audience in mind as they mixed their albums. It said that for many of the albums from the early to mid period of the b as a band, the group would spend hours in the mixing studio to get the mono mix just right, but when it came time to do the stereo mixes, they left that to the audio engineers at Abbey Road and we're never around. So why is that? Well, because to them, the mono recordings were more important. That was what their fan base could enjoy. For that reason, a lot of Beatles fans or purists favor the mono recordings of early Beatles work. They issue the stereo recordings as failing to represent what it was the Beatles were trying to achieve. And if you listen to the mono versus stereo recordings of some of those early songs like Paperback Writer or eleanor Rigby, you really can tell there is a major difference. And this leads into one way to create a stereo or three D audio sound. You can take a recording, and you can change how much of the signal gets sent to a particular channel. That determines which loudspeaker or set of loudspeakers will play back the audio, or more likely, how much volume that particular sound will have in each loudspeaker. This is both a science and an art. A lot of the work in this field was centered around music, and music can contain a wide range of frequencies and tones. Imagine an orchestra. You have instruments that primarily create lower frequencies, like lower pitches. You've got tubas and basses and cellos. Each of those instruments, while creating notes that might be in the same general range, have distinct sounds. A tuba and an upright bass do not sound the same. In other words, then you've got instruments that center on some of the higher frequencies, like flutes and piccolos and violins. These also sound different from one another, and so it became important to figure out how to not just capture a recording and divided into channels to create spatial landscapes, but also how to balance out the tones so that you don't lose anything in the process with the wrong mix. One instrument or group of instruments might totally overpower another, and it's almost as if those other instruments were never even present at the original recording, and so processing recordings and getting the mix just right became critical. One part of this is called panning, and it relies on a pan control. In the old days, you would use a mixing board with physical controls on it to control the pan. The pan determines how much signal from each input is sent to each channel. These days, many audio producers work with digital audio workstations or DAWs, and with a DAW you also control panning. You can pan either mono or stereo tracks. Most DAWs will let you convert one type of track into another, splitting a mono into stereo or combining stereo into mono. For certain types of audio, like MANI podcasts, the default is to go to mono. It can be a little disconcerting if you record and publish a podcast in stereo. Many years ago, when I first started recording large Nerdroun Collider with my friend Ariel, I accidentally recorded and published several episodes in stereo, which meant all of my audio was in one channel, like the left channel and all of Ariel's audio was in the other channel, the right channel. So it's like I was talking into your left ear and Ariel was talking into your right ear, which was very unsettling. I eventually figured out what I was doing, and I began mixing our recordings into a mono track to avoid that problem. And with some early stereo recordings you can hear examples of problems like this. It's frequently disconcerting. There are recordings of songs in which all the instrumentation is on one side and all the vocals are on the other side. Now that might have been done purposefully, but it was often a sort of heavy handed approach to stereo. There are times an artist might desire that specific effect, but other times the desire was to be a bit more creative with stereo, and you might have a track in which the vocalist is on the extreme right of part of the recording, then on the extreme left later on. The beatles A Day in the Life actually falls into that category. Or you might want to create a rich soundscape in which there is a sense of location for all the sound, maybe not something that's explicitly communicated to the listener, but is an important representation of the performance. So how about we play around with some post processing panning to create a three dimensional experience. My producer, Tari, who is a superstar here at iHeart, is always critical to the success of this show. But in a moment, she's going to take over the experience of what this show sounds like to you, the audience. And I'm going to do something I've always wanted to do in three D audio. I'm going to give you a little Shakespeare. This piece is the prologue to Henry the Five, one of Shakespeare's company designated the chorus implores the audience to use their imaginations to augment the production of the play itself. And so as you listen to this piece, imagine you are seated on a stage with the chorus walking around you, explaining your role in creating the theatrical experience. Now, I admit I'm cheating a little bit here, because the whole point of this passage is to say that theater is incapable of creating an exact copy of the story of Henry the Fifth and England's battles with France. But you also have to remember I'm a former English literature major and I never get to do Shakespeare. So out here we go headphones on, Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom, for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Then should the warlike harry, like himself, assume the ports of Mars, and at his heels leashed in like hounds, should famine sword and fire, crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles, all the flat, unraised spirits that have dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object, Candice cockpit, hold the vasty fields of France. Or may we cram within this wooden oh, the very casks that did affright the air at Agincourt. Oh, pardon, since a crooked figure may attest in little place a million, let us ciphers to this great accompt on your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls are now confined two mighty monarchies, whose high, upreared and abudding fronts the perilous narrow ocean parts. Asunder, piece out our imperfections with your thoughts into a thousand parts. Divide one man and make imaginary puissance. Think when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth. For tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, carry them here and there, jumping over times, turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour glass for the which supply at it me chorus to this history, who prologue like your humble patients, prey gently to hear, kindly to judge. I'll play. So for that recording, I went into our studio at I heart, and I spoken to a normal studio microphone. All the manipulation had been done in post production, which is an effective way to achieve that three D audio sound, but it does require a lot of work on the part of the producer. But the three D audio I did at the top of this episode was done in a different way. I used a special microphone. When we come back, i'll talk a bit about that technology, and we'll learn about some companies that have produced specialized equipment for the purposes of three D audio. But first let's take another quick break. While some engineers and artists experimented with binaral recordings for a while, it wasn't until nineteen seventy eight that the first pop record using binaural recordings came out. It was Lou Reid's Street Hassle. Listening to that album with headphones on is pretty cool. To achieve the effect, studio engineers took a mannequin head and installed a microphone at each ear and used that to record sessions. A company called Delta Acoustics put the system together with Manfred Schunk supervising. Read made a couple of other albums in binaral audio. One was the live Take No Prisoners album and the other was The Bells. Other bands would experiment and recorded binaral as well. The Rolling Stones did it for their album Flashpoint, which was a concert recording of some of their big hits and rarities. Pearl Jam recorded a studio album called Binaral, recorded fittingly in binaral. The tech used to record these albums changed slightly, but it was still based on the same underlying principles. I think it's pretty widely understood that our ears received sound in the form of vibrations through a medium such as the air, and then through interactions with the ear drum and the cochlea and special nerves. Sending information to the brain. We interpret those vibrations as sound in a very simple way of looking at it. Sound comes into our ears. But did you know our ears also generate sound, Because they totally do. It's called auto acoustic emission or o a e. Now, to get into o a es, how they work and their role in stuff like medicine is beyond the scope of this podcast, and more importantly, way outside my general expertise. But it is true that a very sensitive microphone inserted into the ear canal of a person with hearing will pick up spontaneous auto acoustic emissions or s o a ease. Now, most folks can't detect these sounds. They tend to be at very low frequencies that dip below human perception, and they are usually at very low amplitudes, so they're pretty quiet. But in some cases people might actually hear the sounds generated within their own inner ears and experience it as tenatus. I'm one of those people, ya me. Now. The reason I bring up that fact that the inner ear can be not just a receptacle for sound but also a generator of sound is because an inventor named Hugo Zucarelli used that as the basis for a system he called holophonics. His idea was that our hearing isn't a passive thing. That the inner ear generates signals that in her fear with the incoming audio signals, and the resulting interaction between the sounds made by our ears and the sounds coming into our ears plays a part in sound localization. Now, long story short, Zuka Relli's hypothesis doesn't have a lot of support in the broader scientific community. However, Zuka Relli's equipment could record and reproduce sound in a really interesting way. It's just the whole interference angle of what was going on seemed inconsequential. Zuka Relli used microphones to stand in for human ears, spaced apart so that a sound from any given direction would reach one microphone before the other, and the amplitude of the signal would depend upon things such as the distance between the microphone and the origin of the sound, as well as the angle at which the sound waves would reach the microphone. Zoka Relli made a bunch of different recordings to demonstrate this technology, something called the shape Matchbox recordings because that was one of the sounds he actually recorded using this system. Whether his underlying hypothesis was correct or not, the recordings were effective, and Zucarelli's approach created a way to make really localized audio effects. That's essentially what was going on with the Disney sound stations. Some of the microphones used by recording studios even resembled a human head, with microphones literally placed where the ears should be, and that also plays a part in recording a sound accurately, so that the playback will seem as though you are really there as you listen to it. Beyond just the fact that our ears are on opposite sides of our heads and the sound will reach each ear at different times and amplitudes, other factors also shape the nature of the sound We perceive, the shape of our heads, the density of our noggins, are sinuses. All of that affects our perception of sound. Collectively, we call all of this head related transfer functions or hr t F. The technology of holophonics systems and later binaral microphones attempts to replicate the experience of hearing hyperlocalized sounds through the application of HRTF. But this process is incredibly complicated and um it's Matthew So I'm not going to go into deep detail, which is good because I would likely mess up the explanation. Also, it's important to acknowledge that every person is different, which means there is no universal solution towards creating the perfect binaral recording that will convince every listener that they are hearing sounds coming from ultra specific directions. You kind of have to go more general to get a good response, but the more precise you try to get, the more the results will only work super well for a specific person, you know, whomever was modeled for, and not we're can quite as well for anyone else. For many years, the microphones used to create binaral recordings in studio were prohibitively expensive and far too complicated for the average consumer. You would occasionally find binaral recordings, such as the one at Disney World, but these were pretty rare and very specialized, and only big companies like Disney could afford to do them. However, over time, companies began to develop microphones that fell more into the range of the pro sumer, with some consumer level solutions thrown in there as well. Today, there is a range of microphones one can use to create three D audio. The microphone I used earlier in this episode is a three D I O binaral mike or three d OH if you prefer. You may have seen one of these if you watch a lot of a s MR videos. They are very popular. The microphone looks like a horizontal bar with two silicone ears attached to either end of that bar. The ears are spaced apart to mimic a typical human heads width. The three d OH doesn't have the mass of a head, it's just that bar in the ears. It doesn't have the sinus cavities or anything like that, so it is not a perfect simulacrum of a person's auditory system, but it gets the job done. That style of microphone typically retails for around four dollars, so it's a little bit on the pricey side, but it kind of falls between consumer and pro sumer. However, you can achieve similar results using totally different microphone setups. They typically require xl R microphones that connect to a recording device that can accept multiple inputs, recording each microphone to its own audio channel. It's possible to use two normal microphones and space them apart from each other and create a binaural experience, though it might take some experimentation to get the spacing and gain levels just right so that it all feels natural. Or of course, you could just do it in post, but like I said, that relies heavily on a ton of work on the back end of things, and a s MR artists are not the only ones using binaural audio. It's also useful for stuff like virtual reality experiences and video games. Sound is a powerful element that contributes to a sense of immersion, and in some games it's critically important. For example, you might play a first person shooter game like Player Unknowns battle Grounds, and you really need to use your ears to figure out where other players are in relation to where you are. Not doing so severely reduces your chances of making it through the game. If you'd like to learn more, I would recommend seeking out Old Tech Stuff episodes about surround sound, which relates to this topic quite a bit, and also our episodes about audio compression, as the process is designed to compress audio trying to take the psychology of perception into account. It's all fascinating stuff. As for three D audio, I figure i'd leave you all with a little bit of horror because three D audio works really well to immerse a listener into a world, and it is particularly well suited for tales of terror. Some of my coworkers used it to great effect in a series called Thirteen Days of Halloween, which we published last October. And so here is a little excerpt from the show they produced. Oh look at all the fun we're having in here. I just knew you do. We get along swimmingly? Oh, come with me, we'll catch up with you later. Diarhard. It is a truly sweet young man. I've been a doing to persuade him to see the good doctor about his cough, but he'll have none of it. Maybe you could be of service in that department. He really seemed to like you. Now, there are hundreds of rooms here in the Hawthorne, but this is perhaps the very finest, and it just so happens to be your waters. Was it luck or fate that placed you here? We'll never know. I trust that you'll find everything to your liking. And if you don't, notify me and I will make sure it is rectified. It's all part of my role here as the care taker. You know, your lack of verbal reciprocation is really breaking down my sense of boundaries. I can trust you, right of course I can. In He's coming days, you may notice that Hawthorne manner has no shortage of oddities. I've witnessed things myself that strain the belief. But there is one strange legend that has truly become something of an obsession. Supposedly that somewhere within these halls there is a hidden doorway. If the tale of what looks on the other side is to be believed, then gaining access would mean a sort of ascension beyond human imagination, true immortality. I have come to understand that one of our guests knows how to locate and open this door. Perhaps what they cannot say to me, they will happily divulge to you. I have a feeling your quiet fortitude will lure them into a sense of intimacy. It is certainly works on me. Please make yourself at home. After all, this is it, There are so many others I cannot wait for you to meet. Well. That wraps up this special episode of tech Stuff. Several of the I Heart shows are including some binaural audio segments, and we've got a lot planned in the three D audio space in the days up ahead. I really recommend you check it out and explore some of the three D audio recordings that are available online. You know that Disney one I mentioned, There are actually versions of that up on YouTube. People have the recordings up. I will say that when I was listening back, it sounded like the channels had been swapped. Everything that was supposed to be in my right ear seemed to be coming through the left ear. And I made sure that I was wearing the headphones directly. That's an important point, by the way. If you're not wearing your headphones with the proper phone over the proper ear, it's very disconcerting. I double checked I was doing it correctly. Everything still seemed flipped, and the effect was not nearly as impressive as it was when I went back to Disney. But I should also add the Disney version incorporated some stuff that headphones just can't do, stuff like a blower behind each person's back, so that when you're getting a haircut in that sequence, the hair dryer would actually blow air on you. So that would add to your sense of immersion. As it stands for me, if I'm listening to a very well recorded three D audio set up. Then if someone speaking quietly into my ear, it's as if I can feel it, because we have to remember sound when it gets down to it really are that's just vibration. Those vibrations include fluctuations and air pressure. So if you are listening to someone talk into your ear through a speaker, you will feel it because those are fluctuations in air pressure. It's not something you're imagining. You are feeling it. It might be heightened because of the way the audio was recorded, but it's actually happening to you. I think three D audio is an incredible technology. There's a lot more we could say about it, and not just from the technological side, but the psychological side and the biological side. So maybe I will do future episodes that will focus on this more. I hope I get a chance to play with the three D audio microphone more. That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing that. I hope that I get to participate in some of the three D audio recordings that we have planned coming up, including some that are delving into different areas of fiction. I would love to do that, Honestly, I would love to do a full three D audio version of a Shakespeare are in play. It is something I have really wanted to do for a long time. I'm not even talking about necessarily being in it, although it would kill me not to be, but to be able to experience a three D audio version of one of Shakespeare's plays, to me, would be unbelievably amazing. So if you think that's interesting, you should write to my Heart and let them know, because I think it would be great. I wouldn't mind working on something like that, and let me know what play you think we should do. Honestly, I'm thinking like much ado about nothing. I think a comedy might be fun. But that wraps up this episode. If you have suggestions for future topics, or maybe you have thoughts about three D audio you would like to share, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. My handle is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This episode was brought to you in I Heeart three D Audio. To experience more podcasts like this search for i Heeart three D audio in the I Heart Radio app. Thank you to our sponsors, Audible, The Conjuring, The Devil Made Me do It, raded R and World of Warcraft,
