I reviewed the literature on human spatial perception and looked at what is and isn’t possible within the 360 compositional space.  

This creative experimentation within the 360 space explored concepts brought forward from the literature review, and resulted in 4 EPs of spatialise compositions for headphone listening. Some of the compositions have become quite minimal in order to leave space for perception of the 360 space, in particular 360 parameters such as azimuth, elevation and radius. Further, the academic atmosphere of the research has put me in the mood to return to my on going interest in the esoteric side of audio, ie binaural beats, solfeggio frequencies and the like.

The first of these works has recently been released through lo fi spiritual and can be heard below. The title of this first release is Solfeggio Sculptures and is released under my own name rather than any of my previous aliases.

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For those unfamiliar with binaural microphones, they replicate the human binaural (two ear) experience. The presence of two ears enables the microphones (placed in each ear) to capture aural cues such as ITD (interaural time differences) and ILD (interaural level differences). Simply put, the two ear microphone captures differences in arrival time of sounds positioned in space around the listener. For example, a sound to the right of the listener or microphone would arrive at the right ear/microphone before it arrives at the left ear/microphone. Such cues we call ITD (interaural time differences). Similarly, the microphone will pick up level differences between the two ears, for example, a sound to the left of the microphone will be louder in the left ear than in the right, hence capturing ILD (interaural level difference) cues.

There are also microphones such as the Neumann KU-100 that also emulates the shadowing effect of the head in the human aural experience, but will a price tag of 12K or thereabouts, I as yet haven’t had the fortune to use such as a mic. See the KU-100 pictured below.

The objective over the summer break was to capture some natural bush and ocean environments with the equipment on loan from SAE. I am grateful to be living these days on the South Coast and the natural soundscapes in my day-to-day life no only have a calming effect on my person, but an inspiration in my creative audio work. Elements of these recordings will inevitably find themselves woven into future electro-acoustic compositions that I will create.

Until then, I have minimally and cleaned up the recordings for public use and access. The recordings have been minimally edited to remove noises such as mic bumps and wind distortion. A touch of RX 7 Spectral De-Noise has also been used with a Reduction curve to focus on any low-frequency rumble from neighbouring highways and urban noise pollution in general.

If you would like to use these recordings, please do so as I have put them up on freesound.org with the Creative Commons license 0, ie you may use them commercially and do not need to credit me.

For those interested further in binaural recording, I have found on my journey both the written work and field recordings of Gordon Hempton to be highly inspirational. You can listen to his work at his website soundtracker.com, and to hear more about his efforts to preserve silent spaces, spaces devoid of any industrial noise, I’d very much advise listening to a great podcast, One Being, where Gordon is interviewed by the wonderful Krista Tippet.

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The lovely folks at the label have just released my EP as part of their Winter Batch of cassette releases. It can also be found at all the usual stream sites, such as Spotify below.

I have put this new EP out under a new alias, Open Spaces. Both this work and future works under this alias will be used to explore the realms of 360 audio. This EP was largely written as part of my Masters research into 360 audio techniques such as binaural recording and ambisonic spatialisation software, such as the open source freeware from Envelop.

A big thanks to Steven Ramsey and the rest of the Constellation Tatsu folks for believing in this record.

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Coupled with a portable recorder, I have been capturing some 360 sonic panoramas of the south coast coastline, weather & bush environments.

Due to wind & background noise, some of the recordings have needed a bit of RX7 Spectral De-Noise and post production in general. As a result I have recorded a Youtube video which serves as a good intro to Izotope’s RX7 De-Noiser.

Lastly, a few of my favourite immersive 360 recordings from the session can be found at my freesounds.org page. Be sure to check the file titled trying to record 360 sound in the bush with the kids. Whilst unusable for what I intended the audio for, it does demonstrate the Azimuth abilities of the microphone set up, by that I mean the variable that can position sound spatially behind the listener.

From a binaural sound recording angle, Gordan Hempton, has been a bit of an inspiration of late. You can hear some of his super high resolution Neumann KU-100 Dummy Head binaural recordings through Quiet Planet, and their Soundcloud.

On a more beats tip, I’ve been revisiting Yosi Horikawa and his use of 360 field recordings within electronic music. The below 2018 Red Bull documentary shows him busy in field-recording mode with what looks like a strange DIY four capsule mic build.

Safe travels and happy adventures in sound to you all.

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