YOUR HEADPHONES HAVE been lying to you. Maybe you’ve suspected that the tinny sound piping through your earbuds isn’t an exact replica of the rich, nuanced audio that our ears naturally capture. Don’t blame the headphones. Blame the recording device.
Most of the audio we listen to is recorded with a single microphone, which totally ignores the way we actually hear—from two ears. Binuaric wants to correct that oversight. The German company believes it has developed a way to record and listen to true 3-D audio, the kind that mimics the natural surround system of the world, in a pair of earphones.
Its OpenEars earphones (now on Kickstarter) record and play back what is referred to as binaural sound, or sound that’s captured from two microphones. The trick is to record sound waves as close to the human ear as possible, as a way to mimic accurately the way it hears. Binaural sound has been recorded for decades, but the technology used do it has always been clunky, requiring hefty microphones that sit atop “dummy heads” that mimic the natural shape of the human noggin. Binauric’s headphones have two little condenser microphone slots alongside the outer ear that capture sound waves at the rate they hit your ear, which allows you to record conversations and sounds like you might hear them in real life. “We just copied our ears and put it in a technology,” says Tanja Schauer, a co-founder of Binauric. With OpenEars, the company promises, you will be able to revisit a child’s first words as if the toddler were still in the room.
The thing about having two ears is that, depending on where the sound is coming from, you’re going hear it in the left and right ear at different times. Say you hear laughter on your left side. That sound is eventually going to make it to your right ear, but by the time it does, it will have traveled around your head and bounced off all sorts of environmental obstacles, which means it’s probably going to sound softer and slightly more muffled than what you heard in your left ear. We don’t notice these subtle differences day to day—after a while, our aural environment becomes stitched together—but they play a huge role in how we perceive the world. Binaural recordings are able to account for these environmental impacts.
Binauric has miniaturized binaural recording technology to a degree where it’s possible to stick them into headphones. To begin recording you tap the headphones; that audio can be turned into typical formats like WAV and MP3 or streamed directly through an app. The headphones have something the Binauric team calls “hear through,” which allows you to set, via an app, how much of the outside world you want to hear through your headphones. Also of note: They designed a GoPro add-on that hooks to helmets and syncs with the camera to capture 3-D sound.
Pretty neat stuff. But should we even care? Does it matter that the sound on your Instagram video isn’t top quality? Maybe not. It’s clear that Binauric’s vision isn’t about capturing the best musical audio. The company is more interested in the mundane—taxi horns, children laughing, old men telling bad jokes on the subway.
Smartphone camera technology has made huge strides, so much so that buying an auxiliary camera seems silly unless you’re using it to take professional photos and video. Our smartphone’s mics aren’t nearly as advanced. We’re just now getting to the point where we’ll be able to capture the aural world in the same quality as the visual world, and with as much ease. That’s pretty exciting. Because while looking at a photo of your family reunion is a fine way to recall an experience, there’s something about hearing the intonation of voices, the laughter (or the bickering) that’s so much more evocative.
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