When friends and family see me working on my CAD drawings or the mess of electronic components *neatly* laid out on the coffee table, they just have to ask what I'm doing. I usually respond with a cheerful, "I'm building my own headphones." Then, there's a few moments of awkward silence until they can shake that "deer in the headlights" look and respond.
"Well, why?"
I shouldn't be surprised by their response. After all, headphones are so numerous you can find one in nearly every store; they come in an assortment of styles; a price can be found to match a pocket book of any size. Simply put, there is a headphone on the market to suit every "need", so why design your own?
This pursuit starts with a hobby. It may not be the most constructive of hobbies, but one that I enjoy... experiencing media. My media is mainly comprised of Movies and Games. What I enjoy most about media is the sense of immersion into a different time and place.
Immersion: To become so deeply engaged where idiosyncrasies to what the body considers natural are not just ignored, but rather accepted.
Manufacturers of entertainment devices and equipment are always looking to develop new product that tap into your senses to bring you to a new level of immersion. One of the more recent developments being pushed was 3D video, where a two-dimensional picture is transformed into an image that our brain interprets with depth. At the time, I felt this was the wrong direction and decided to focus my attention toward audio improvements.
As I studied rudimentary acoustics I felt my opinions on "better audio, not better video" were supported. A simple phenomena (Do doo be-do-do) makes the point. With your eyes closed, you can enter an unfamiliar space and, through acoustic wave reflection and delay, your brain will map out the approximate size of the room. Your brain has the power to tell you the relative size of a room without the use of your eyes.
That's great Nathaniel, but my eyes can do the same thing, but better (and without tripping over the coffee table).
With the moving picture and advances in photography, anything imaginable can be put in front of our eyes and be believable. However, if what you see does not match with what you hear, it is less immersive. For example, you could be watching a king sitting in a throne room addressing his court. The effects are astounding, "spare no expense", the lighting is gorgeous, but when the king speaks and his voice doesn't echo, but rather sounds like you're in a padded cell, you have now lost a great degree of immersion. Instead you are positioning yourself, not in a fantasy world, but back in your home. By leveraging the power of your brain to interpret audio waves, we can completely transform your piddly media room, living room, or dining room table into a vastly different world.
Okay! I'm convinced, audio IS important. So what can be done to make audio more "realistic"?
Sound sources can originate in any direction, so why do we limit ourselves to two speakers in headphones? Depending on how the original audio is recorded and mixed, two speakers merely make a differentiation between left and right sources and, to some degrees, depth. The depth is very limited and doesn't provide a full spectrum from front to back for the listener. Many of you already know, most movies and games are mixed to allow for multiple speaker surround sound, but so few headphones on the market take advantage of it.
So you mean there is nothing out there on the market that targets this limitation?
Yes and no. Surround sound headphones do exist on the market and are broken down into two types; virtual and true. Virtual surround sound headphones usually comprise of two speakers, one in the left and one in the right. The audio that is generated is sent through a special processing chip that is able to apply effects to the audio to give a surround sound "feel".
I'm no electrical or acoustical engineer, but from what I gather, it can adjust the pitch, timing, delay, etc. to give the impression of front and rear sources. The problem with this method is that the designers makes some generalizations on how a person's brain interprets these signals. In the real world, slight variation between the way our bodies are built cause the waves entering our ear canal to be slightly different from one person to another. Using a non-scientific illustration I hope to make this concept more clear.
You are standing in the middle of your living room with your back to the window (you have a window, right?). All of a sudden, something hits the window *thud*. Your brain quickly interprets the audio waves and tells you that the thud came from behind. If we were able to measure a single hypothetical property of the wave entering your ear canal, it might read 1.345. This value correlates with the sound coming from behind at 'X' degrees, 'X' feet away, dampened by 'X' mm of glass, etc. Now, I stand in the same exact spot and the same exact sound emanates from the window in the same exact location. This time, the special "measurer" of non-real world properties reads 1.271.
Despite these values being different, we both knew where the sound came from. The reason being, at a young age, through experiences/trail&error we have "learned" how to interpret these numbers to determine the point of origin for a sound.
Why are these numbers different between us? Maybe my ears stick out further than yours... or maybe my head is more hollow... or maybe your shoulders are broader (yes, shoulders play into this) than mine. All kinds of minor variations in body structure can alter the original sound wave. And because our bodies are all slightly different from one another, a pre-determined value from a machine may not be as naturally interpreted or accurate. This is where virtual surround sound fails. It can only make a generalization for how we interpret sound.
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| (http://www.lurvely.com/photo/514994063/Speaker_art/) |
True surround, on the other hand, employs multiple speakers in each ear cup positioned to create multiple points of origin. Great in theory, but many solutions on the market lack the luster. In many headsets, the speakers are positioned so close to the ear that any opportunity for the acoustic waves to be altered by your body is lost. As stated above, your body plays a large role in manipulating the original sound wave to the result that your brain eventually interprets. These headphones that direct the audio straight down the ear canal are unnatural compared to real life where your skull, pinae, shoulders, etc play into account. I blame positioning on why the majority of these headphones fail to work as they claim.
With enough "practice" your brain will "learn" how to interpret the signals from either the Virtual or True surround headphones. I, however, want to blend the line between reality and your media by creating a set that naturally invokes your normal brain patterns.
My goal is develop a product that incorporates your natural body structures to keep the acoustic signals as intuitive as possible.
To see my latest developments on this project, please join me on my facebook page at facebook.com/NathanielCustom.
