CHAPTER ONE - HOW WE CREATE A 3D SOUNDSCAPE OF THE WORLD
This page contains examples for the book Immersive Spatial Sound.
Chapter 1 - How We Create A 3D Soundscape Of The World | Chapter 2 - Binaural Sound | Chapter 3 - Using Binaural Sound In Audio Drama | Chapter 4 - Using Binaural Sound In Theatre | Chapter 5 - Ambisonics, Dynamic Binaural Sound & 360° Films | Chapter 6 - VR, AR, MR & Game Audio Technology | Chapter 7 - Loudspeaker Spatialisation | Chapter 8 - Cinema, Home Cinema & The Rise Of Dolby Atmos | Chapter 9 - Spatial Audio For Music Production | Chapter 10 - Theatre & Concerts
Please wear headphones when listening to these examples.
Before you start listening to examples, check your headphones are working properly by playing this audio clip.
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There is a little known issue with Bluetooth headphones/headsets. If you are using a set of wireless/Bluetooth headphones, and you select to also use that as the microphone in your teleconferencing software (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype, etc) then all audio in your headphones will change from stereo to mono, and is reduced to a really low quality 8kHz sample rate. This is because the Bluetooth data bandwidth is quite low, so if you’re not using the mic built in to your headphones, all that data can be used to provide high quality stereo audio; but if you use the mic, half that data is used for the microphone, and only half the data is then available for the headphone audio. This is a feature of Bluetooth itself, so this applies to Mac’s and PC;s, desktops and tablets, cheap Bluetooth headphones and the most expensive Apple headsets.
You can test this:
connect some bluetooth headphones to your computer.
close all applications.
listen to this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnzIIhLNHqg
it should sound super high quality, very stereo and lovely.
Now, open up Zoom or Meet or Teams, and start a new meeting, with the Mic input set to your bluetooth headphones
You should instantly hear the audio in your headphones flatten into mono, and reduce in audio quality to about 10% of what it was.
You can get round this by using wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones that don’t have a built-in mic (quite rare these days) or by using your Bluetooth headphones and selecting to use the build-in computer microphone rather than the headphones’s microphone.
And yes, it does apply to AirPods too.
Example - Sound off to one side
Example - Directly in front of us VS DIRECTLY BEHIND
PAGE 13 - VERTICAL RESOLUTION
PAGE 15 - THE SPACE IN SPATIAL SOUND
If a sound source is close to us in a reverberant space – for instance, someone speaking while standing next to us in a church - we will hear their voice relatively clearly – the sound coming directly from them will be loud, while the reverberant sound will be relatively quiet. We refer to this as a high direct-to-reverberant ratio. We can locate the direction of their voice fairly easily, and that high ratio aids our distance perception, indicating that the sound source is nearby.
If the sound source is further away – for instance, someone speaking at the other end of the church - we will hear comparatively less of the sound coming directly from them because the sound gets quieter over distance, compared to the reverberant sound. This would be called a low direct-to-reverberant ratio. It is harder to identify the exact source of their voice clearly (and ioften harder to understand), as the reflected sounds interact with the direct sound to muddy up the clues we use to identify the location. However, as the direct sound and most of the reflections will be coming from the direction of the sound source, we will get clues about where they are approximately. The low ratio also lets us know that the sound source isn’t close to us.