Binaural bliss

January 6, 2010, 4:17 pm
Filed under: binaural, Bruce Tovsky, events, Kamran Sadeghi, o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi), Paul Devens, Richard Garet, Shimpei Takeda

(Still from Shimpei Takeda’s projection)

Three pieces recorded during a session held last December. Participants were Paul Devens, visiting from Maastricht and meeting up with old friend Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat) and Richard Garet, plus the much acclaimed (and yet, rarely spotted) sound-video duo of Bruce Tovsky and Shimpei Takeda – all introduced by the charming and understated tones of Kamran Sadeghi. Perfect human chemistry, resulting in three fantastic recordings.. you really know that something special was going on. Luckily, the whole event has been recorded by Bruce Tovsky using his state-of-the-art binaural microphone head, which means the guarantee of a blissful headphones listen. I swear, that head is quite a presence – but for friends, it’s just “Bernardo” …

This is what Bruce says: “This recording was made with a homemade binaural head, using two high quality omnidirectional microphones placed at the dummy’s ears, so when played back and listened to on headphones the listener perceives a 360 degree soundstage – with sounds coming from above, below and behind in addition to directly in front. Binaural recordings translate very well on conventional stereo systems, with an enhanced feeling of depth to the soundstage. Another advantage to the omnidirectional mics used in this process is the excellent bass response that they provide, and this recording features some deep sub-bass tones that might not be audible on computer speakers or normal stereo systems not equipped with a subwoofer or speakers with exceptional bass response. The recording was made to a Olympus LS-10 compact flash recorder at 96k/24bit, and then dithered down to a 48k/16bit master for the video.”

Anyway – the video will require some more work before it can be posted here, so that will have to go with the next blog post. But all sound recordings are available for streaming (through the Flash players below), and for download as free, open source, ogg Vorbis files, or as 320 kbps mp3 files.
Kamran Sadeghi