Spatial Audio
You can re-create music thumping through your ceiling from an upstairs neighbor.
Equipment
You'll need wired, over-the-ear
headphones. You'll need a
smartphone to act as a gyroscope. A separate
computer is ideal but not required.
Instructions
- Visit this website on your phone and on your computer:
https://logical.ai/spatial/
- They should pair automatically over WiFi unless other people near you are also using the website. You can also pair using a pairing code.
- Plug in your headphones to your computer
- Put the phone on your head like a hat: screen up, top of the phone facing forward. The phone will track the motion of your head.
- Put on the headphones. Use the headphones to secure the phone to your head.
- Calibrate: face straight ahead and click Reset
- Select music. You can play a built-in song, or any song file from your computer. I suggest something with strong bass for maximal effect.
- Look around you. You can turn your head in any direction and spin in your chair. Amazingly, the sound won't move. See if you can identify where, or what object, in your room it seems to be coming from.
- Change the room. You can drag the dial to change the direction of the sound. You can use the dropdown to change the space you're in.
How does this work?
Ears recognize all-around sound. In everyday life, your ears naturally decode the source of sound from any direction—around, above, and below. To determine this, they use cues like the difference in timing between your ears, or how sound waves interact with the exact shape of your ears and head. This program uses a model of the human ear to recreate the ear-shape effect, tricking your ears into thinking the sound is coming from a specific real-life direction.
Walls transform sound. When sound plays through a thick ceiling or wall, the wall absorbs some of the sound—mostly the high frequencies, while the bass comes through unchanged. We recognize this muffled quality, interpreting it as sound coming through a thick barrier. The reason over-the-ear headphones are required is that you need rich bass to hear this effect, which earbuds sometimes lack.
Speed is essential. When you tilt your head in a new direction, the program must instantly update the sound it's feeding each ear. It must update so fast that your ears sense no delay or choppiness—a window of tens of milliseconds. I took pains to make sure this code runs fast enough. The reason wired headphones are required is that bluetooth has around 200ms latency—too slow to keep up.
Why did you make this?
The sheer magic of simulacrum. Yes, from one point of view, this program simulates an inconsiderate neighbor blasting music at 2am—usually a bad thing. But here you can switch it on and off like a light! For me, I love being able to evoke a sense of space and social presence, to augment mundane reality with mundane reality until it's transcendent, to magically re-create a familiar embodied experience out of nothing, out of anywhere.