The Illusion of the Piano in the Room

Hello there,

As a person who has enjoyed (and heartily recommends) the Virtual Barbarshop demonstration for years, I still perceive zero imagining in "front" of my head, as opposed to everything occurring "behind" my ears.  This is despite owning AKG 702 headphones (the studio version of the famed AKG 701) since 2009.  To date, I have never been able to 'move' any sound source to the front of my ears while wearing very good headphones.

Cheers,

Joe

I think the problem with binaural is it has to model the filtering effect that your head and ears have on the sound from different directions, but this depends on the shape of your particular head and ears. Your perception is perfectly adapted to your head geometry! Any standard effect has to be based on a generic approximation, so it will never reproduce the 3D effect exactly. For some people it will be worse than others.

Having said that, I've had a lot of success in Pianoteq binaural mode by changing the head size, stereo width and sound speed. I seem to always end up lowering the sound speed to around 250, which is weird, but it works for me.

Yes, I tried listening to this short demo while using AKG 702 (studio version of AKG 701) phones.  Even with eyes closed, and if I tried to imagine the sound came from the front, at best, I would say ... "I suppose so."  Now, HAD the sound seemed to originate from in front of me as a palpable source, I would have become a great champion of this technology.  Alas, I say, it's cute ... but not convincing.

Cheers, and thank you for recommending this youtube video.

Cheers,

Joe

I listened to this and was able to hear the front sounds above my head, but not really in front.  The rear and side sounds were more convincing.  I wonder why it is hard to get a convincing front sound?

I suppose the reason the full frontal illusion does not come about ... has to do with the way the headphones and earbuds work:  They 'inject' the sound into our ears, without having the benefit of the slight timing differences instilled by the geometries of our outer ears. 

When I still worked in the American steel industry, I knew a poor soul of a man who had endured losing his outer ears due to an industrial accident (after a nearly fatal fire that had severely disfigured his entire face).  He told me that he had completely lost his front to back sense of hearing, as though his entire rest-of-life destiny is to perceive natural external sounds "from within" his head -- all due to his loss of his pinnae (outer ear-shaped appendages).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Joe

Thanks for the explanation.  That man was horribly injured.  I would conclude that the pinnae needs to be modeled, too, which is apparently missing in the two demonstrations and/or people's ears are different enough that different people hear different things for what is modeled.  I imagine Pianoteq could be improved with an ear model, perhaps with appropriate parameters, though it is clearly a hard problem.

Modifying the sound speed is something I haven't tried. I'll give this a shot, although wouldn't it just be a way of creating another form of latency?

The sound changes that the binaural head undergoes when moved also seem very exaggerated with some instruments. Move that head just an itty bit and the whole soundscape changes. Today for fun, while playing my acoustic piano, I moved my head far from side to side and front to back, taking careful note of the changes in the sound, and it wasn't nearly as extreme as when moving the dummy head approximately the same distance (proportionately) in Pianoteq.

I recall someone once mentioned another VST they use to achieve the sound I am aiming for with headphones. However, since I use the stand-alone version at all times, I'd like to get as close as possible within Pianoteq alone.

It's not just volume. There are also timing differences. Sound travels 34cm per millisecond, so it can take nearly a millisecond for the sound to travel around the head. However, this still doesn't distinguish front/back. It's the shape of your ears that do that - why else do you think they are such a weird shape?! Different frequencies are emphasized or de-emphasized depending on the direction of the source. Our brains are finely tuned to this. Try cupping your hands behind your ears and see how that affects the colour of the sound and your sense of its direction.