Experiencing Binaural Listening – recreating a 3D sound space through headphones,
which is an ever-expanding aspect of present-day audio – will be an integral
component of the 140th Audio Engineering Society Convention, coming to the Palais
des Congres in Paris June 4 to 7. France occupies a leading role in the research and
the development of Binaural Listening (the BiLi project) due to both the remarkable
research of Rozenn Nicol at Orange Labs (formerly France Telecom) and the
growing demand for binaural listening in the Audio and Audio Visual market. Rozenn
is also the author of a fascinating AES Monograph on Binaural Technology.

During the Technical Program at the 140th AES Convention, many of the groups
participating in the BiLi project in France will be present (Orange Labs, France
Televisions, CNSMDP – Conservatoire de Paris, IRCAM, Radio France, Arkamys,
Trinnov, a-volute, CNRS-LIMSI). One of the workshop rooms will be completely
equipped with headphones so attendees can hear a Binaural Listening experience
first-hand. Radio France, under the responsibility of Edwige Ronciere and Herve
Desjardin, have also produced a remarkable amount of program material for both
5.1 Multichannel and Binaural Listening. This important research and development
work will be presented in Workshops, and through special activities devoted to
Audio Projection, in Multichannel and with Binaural Listening.

Our Convention Co-chair Mike Williams says, “I can recall when I first joined the
BBC in 1960, we used to look with some amusement on the people who listened to
music on headphones. However I can also remember my first overwhelming
experience of listening to a vinyl recording of Cheherezada on BBC cans
(headphones) which I had modified to take stereo signals – strictly forbidden, by
the way. The world has changed rapidly over the years, and now the number of
people listening on headphones, earphones and earbuds far outweighs the
loudspeaker listening public. The great majority of the public are now Binaural
Listeners, whether we are talking about MP3 and Hi-Res portable players,
smartphones, tablets, hi-fi headphones, audio for television, or audio gaming.’

The goal of binaural listening with headphones is to recreate inter-aural cues that
are analysed by the brain to construct a representation of the 3D sound stage.
There are two main ways to reproduce these interaural cues to create binaural
content, but there are many ways to use these methods for artistic or dramatic
purposes.

• One seeks to use a dummy head to reproduce with as much precision as
possible the binaural cues that we would experience in the real live listening
situation. This approach is the most obvious method, but there are many difficulties
to putting this into practice. For instance, it does not allow changes of sound source
position when mixing, there is also the problem of head tracking (having the sound
field not following the head movement) to be taken into account, and the precise
matching of the listener’s particular Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) is of
primary importance.

• The other approach seeks to recreate these binaural cues. Each direction
of sound sources will be recreated virtually by applying the correct interaural cues
(HRTF) – these different directions could be the position of virtual loudspeakers in
the case of binauralization of multichannel content, or the position of objects in the
case of the audio object approach. Binaural Listening, within the 140th AES
Convention’s Immersive Audio track, will present both approaches to this old but
newly reborn technology, bringing the listener up to date on the science and art of
the present day Binaural Technology environment.

If it’s about Binaural, it’s at AES.

For more information on the 140th International Audio Engineering Society
Convention in Paris, France, visit aes.org/events/140/