80% of the music and nature sounds on Infinity Road were recorded in three-dimensional audio using a phenomenon called Binaural Head. And what an audio treat it is!
Brenda Wilde tells you, “You’ll be astonished at how really present you feel. On ‘Reflections‘ it’s as if your head is in the playing position alongside Tim Wheater as he breathes into the flute and executes the finger clicks. On ‘Bitter Suite‘ you’ll be convinced you’re in a rain forest surrounded by hundreds of birds.”
This fascinating device that enables such realism was originally developed for the automotive industry in Europe. They commissioned a German brain surgeon and a scientist to build a microphone simulating human hearing to test their automobiles for quietness of ride, and isolate all types of noise anywhere in the car’s interior or frame.
To simulate human hearing they built a replica of the human hearing system, using as their vehicle the human head. And so the Binaural Head is just that, a model of a head with sculpted eye-sockets, a nose, mouth, a neck, and shoulders, looking very much like a mannequin for hats.
To quote the head’s keeper, Charles Plaisance, and the album’s co-producer and engineer Franz Pusch of Maple Disc Music, “… It’s weird!”
There are only nine such 3-D microphones in use in the entertainment industry. This microphone is the basis for the dimensional sound in virtual reality. The Binaural Head is composed of two microphones for a three-dimensional effect, simulating human hearing. Therefore the head hears not only right/left, but front, back, up, and down. It perceives distance and direction, totally giving you a feeling of realism.
The design is constructed with the weight and density of an anatomical human head, an important and necessary contribution to the overall effect. The role of the shoulders, as in human anatomy, is to facilitate sound reflections and contribute to the sensation of directional hearing. The surface materials simulate the reflective and absorption qualities of human skin. The ears are position precisely as human ears, with a microphone situated within what would be the ear canal, at the point of the eardrum.
This dual microphone positioning allows the experience of directional and three-dimensional hearing, exactly like that of the anatomical year the microphones duplicate the 14.6 millisecond phase delay present in actual sound perception. The shoulders provide EQ. The anatomical ear has a difference in EQ from the left to your right ear, so you hear the signal with a different equalization and phase in both ears at all times, allowing your brain to determine where the signal originates. With this device unlike a standard stereo recording mike, you can actually fake the brain to believing it is hearing direction.