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Processing Artificial-Head Recordings

Artificial-head recordings acquired a professional standard over the last years which has been proven by many recordings. But in practice, sound engineers often got the problem of working on different recordings, of mixing additional sound sources or of creating a head related recording using normal multi-microphone technique. Mixing of different artificial head recordings is straight foreware if when the recordings have been made in the same room under equal acoustical conditions. Filtering of these recordings is possible as described in the following. If you want to add a new sound source recorded by a normal microphone a special binaural mixing console is needed. By this mixing console normal microphone signals or output signals of synthesizers e.g. can be transformed into head related signals containing the additional information direction of sound incidence which can be chosen at the binaural mixing console. Using this mixing console it is also possible, to create an artificial head recording using multimicrophone technique without using an artificial head. All sound sources, vocals, guitars, synthesizers and so on can be directionalized by using the binaural mixing console. Furthermore binaural reverberation or echo can be created using reverberation units in conjunction with this mixing console. So working in the studio is possible as usual with the additional possibility to add the information of sound incidence to every sound source and creating a new head related recording. This new technique is fully compatible to usual recording and reproduction technique. Listening to these recordings using headphones, you get a very natural spatial hearing event where all sound sources can be located in the direction chosen by the sound engineer during the mixing. Listening to such a recording using loudspeakers in a normal room, you get a stereophonic reproduction without any loss of sound quality as compared to a usual stereophonic recording. Most of the recordings made using artificial-head technology lead to better transparency by loudspeaker-reproduction than recordings made by multi-microphone technique.

Authors: Gierlich, H. W.; Genuit, K.
Affiliation: Institut far Elektrische Nachrichtentechnik der RW'1-H Aachen, Aachen, West Germany
AES Convention:82 (March 1987) Paper Number:2460 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Psychoacoustics

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