Binaural Kit

I was still unsure to what music/sound I would use for my project, the use of canned, diegetic sound to enhance some of the objects of observations was something I wanted to include but I was still unsure on whether to provide a soft musical background to the project, or alternatively use the background sounds that are picked up from the camera whilst filming. The issue with the latter is that on video and audio recording devices the sound that is recorded isn't the same as the sound as what our ears here. Stereo microphones/ recording devices basically fake a sense of spacial audio by presenting our brains with a concept of left and right spacial sounds.

"The main field of sound recording heavily overlaps with both their left or right counterparts in front of the mic, focusing 40 percent or more (depending on the microphone) on the sound in front of us. This is not how we actually hear. We accept this because our eyes see forward in this rather narrow 40% overlap, therefore we think that is how the sound actually moves around us, but that’s not the reality of sounds audible presents around us. In addition, stereo never reaches much further than beyond a 180º sound plain. What about the sounds behind us that we can hear equally as well as the sounds before us?"

As the diagram above shows, a stereo microphone/recording device can by no means truly present the dimensions of sound which naturally emanate not only from the left, right, but before and behind us, in the same manner which our ears deliver to our brains the exact audible landscape we hear.

After this discovery I was introduced to the Binaural Kit. With binaural microphones, we are presented with an exact replication of the entire theatre of sound surrounding us in the exact same way our ears send the audible sensation to our brains. The audio recording from a binaural kit is a close to accurate representation of the dimensions of sound that the human hears.