Binaural recordings

Have you ever listened to a binaural recording?

Via wikipedia:

The term "binaural" has often been confused as a synonym for the word "stereo", and this is partially due to a large amount of misuse in the mid-1950s by the recording industry, as a marketing buzzword. Conventional stereo recordings do not factor in natural crossfeed or sonic shaping of the head and ear, since these things happen naturally as a person listens, generating their own ITDs and ILDs.

A typical binaural recording unit has two high-fidelity microphones mounted in a dummy head, inset in ear-shaped molds to fully capture all of the audio frequency adjustments (known as HRTFs in the psychoacoustic research community) that happen naturally as sound wraps around the human head and is "shaped" by the form of the outer and inner ear.

Once recorded, the binaural effect can be reproduced only using headphones. The result is a listening experience that spatially transcends normally recorded stereo, since it accurately reproduces the effect of hearing a sound in person, given the 360° nature of how human ears pick up nuance in the sound waves. Binaural recordings can very convincingly reproduce location of sound behind, ahead, above, or wherever else the sound actually came from during recording.

Peal Jam's 'Binaural' album contains several tracks that were recorded with this technique.

I hunted around the Freesound Project - "a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds" - for some of the better binaural-tagged clips and found these, take a listen with your headphones (otherwise you lose the effect):

• By the river: recorded at dusk by the river Tarn, Cevennes, France
• Squeeking door: unlocking and opening a squeaking door, then closing and locking again
• Crash: very loud metal crash
• Bagpipes in Pitlochery: I only included this one because I spent some time in this small Scottish town in 2004 ;)

Enjoy!

UPDATE: More impressive holophonic sounds at Auditory Illusions : Holophonic Sound, and don't miss Jurassic Lunch!