Binaural Recording - History

History

The history of binaural recording goes back to 1881. The first binaural unit, the Théâtrophone, was an array of carbon telephone microphones installed along the front edge of the Opera Garnier. The signal was sent to subscribers through the telephone system, and required that they wear a special head set, which had a tiny speaker for each ear.

The novelty wore off, and there wasn't significant interest in the technology until around forty years later when a Connecticut radio station began to broadcast binaural shows. Stereo radio had not yet been implemented, so the station actually broadcast the left channel on one frequency and the right channel on a second. Listeners would then have to own two radios, and plug the right and left ear pieces of their head sets into each radio. Naturally, the expense of owning two radios was, at the time, too much for a broad audience, and again binaural faded into obscurity.

Binaural stayed in the background due to the expensive, specialized equipment required for quality recordings, and the requirement of headphones for proper reproduction. Particularly in pre-Walkman days, most consumers considered headphones an inconvenience, and were only interested in recordings that could be listened to on a home stereo system or in automobiles. Lastly, the types of things that can be recorded do not have a typically high market value. Recordings that are done in studios would have little to benefit from using a binaural set up, beyond natural cross-feed, as the spatial quality of the studio would not be very dynamic and interesting. Recordings that are of interest are live orchestral performances, and ambient "environmental" recordings of city sounds, nature, and other such subject matters.

The modern era has seen a resurgence of interest in binaural, specifically within the audiophile community, partially due to the widespread availability of headphones, and cheaper methods of recording. A small grassroots movement of people building their own recording sets and swapping them on the Internet has joined the very few CDs available for purchase. Sony released the wmR15 in 1984 a recording walkman with specialized headphones capable of Binaural recording by way of using the user's own pinnae to reflect sounds into the tiny microphones located on the left and right at the stem/ear level portion of the headphone head band.(http://boomboxery.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=13757)

In the late 1970s, Lou Reed recorded 3 albums in binaural: Street Hassle, Live: Take No Prisoners, and The Bells. In 2000, the American rock band Pearl Jam released an album titled Binaural, in which the binaural recording method was used for some tracks.

The additional content present on the DVD release of Monsters, Inc. includes a practical presentation of binaural recording, featuring a Pixar sound engineer and actors John Goodman and Billy Crystal.

In 2004, many lacquer masters were discovered in the vaults of Sony Music Studios in New York which consisted of recordings that Leopold Stokowski and his All-American Youth Orchestra had made for Columbia Records in Hollywood in the summer of 1941. These lacquers had been recorded in pairs, on two separate turntables, one being a safety back-up to the other in case something went wrong with the subsequent dubbing to 78rpm discs. Significantly, the pairs of lacquers were labelled "Left" and "Right" respectively, rather than "A" and "B" as was usually the case. It was also usually the case in 78rpm recordings that the same microphone source fed each of the two turntables. However, these labelling differences led to a couple of experiments whereby the "Left" and "Right" lacquers of two recordings were painstakingly synchronised. These experiments proved that for these sessions two separate microphones had been used, placed near each other and each leading to its own turntable, with binaural sound being the result when synchronised. The two binaural recordings were made available to the Leopold Stokowski Society and both have now been released on CD: Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries on Cala Records CACD0549 and the 'Scherzo' from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream on Cala Records CACD0551.

In 2009, the BBC Radio 7 science fiction drama Planet B used an online binaural advert in order to promote the programme's second series. There are several games for the iPhone which use binaural audio. These include Zen Bound from developer Secret Exit, and Aves by Action = Reaction Games. In its April 2010 issue, the UK edition of Wired magazine covered Papa Sangre from developer Somethin' Else, a "video game with no video" created entirely in binaural audio and which claims to be the first iPhone game to have an engine that can create binaural audio in real time by processing sound sources using an HRTF.