An article last Friday (4/29) on the Studio 360 website states, “Edgar Choueiri knows how things work; he’s a rocket scientist—officially, the Director of Princeton University’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. … He has developed a way to render sound in three dimensions, and given Studio 360 listeners an exclusive first listen of his 3D audio technology. … Imagine … being able to pick out the soloists in a choral performance of a Bach Mass (see how Bach’s Mass in B Minor inspired Choueiri’s 3D work). http://www.studio360.org/blogs/studio-360-blog/2011/apr/27/rocket-scientist-day-3d-audio-inventor-night/… So how does it work? Conventional stereo recordings already incorporate rich location information, but our ears do not capture it during playback because of what engineers call ‘crosstalk’: the fact that your left ear hears sound from the left speaker but also the right speaker (and vice versa). … Drawing on some of the math in plasma physics, Choueiri devised a digital algorithm that cancels crosstalk transparently without changing the tonal quality of the sound. The brain naturally does the rest, allowing listeners to pinpoint the original placement of sound in space more like it would if we were hearing the ‘real thing.’ ”
Posted May 5, 2011
