The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in surround sound Always a bit of a lottery getting into Kings College for this carol service though you can easily get in for other services during the rest of the year. Here for a limited time are two different recordings of the complete carol service which may offer surround sound to some. Only tried from the UK, don't know if it works abroad.
posted by epo on Dec 23, 2011 - 11 comments

Modern mainstream video games tend to be about framerates and millions of polygons per second. But it is possible to play games that have hardly any graphics at all: audio-only games like Papa Sangre, designed for iOS devices, being the most recent example of the genre (and with binaural audio, probably the most ambitious). There are others: In The Pit for Xbox 360 (or a PC with a 360 wired controller) [previously], the (sadly incomplete) Cadet 277 for PC and Mac, and SoundVoyager, released in 2006 for the Nintendo. More at the Experimental Gameplay Project.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Feb 12, 2011 - 14 comments

Binaural Beats have been mentioned before, but that was when they were innocent, before someone thought of the children.
posted by tkolar on Aug 9, 2008 - 77 comments

In a single 1931 document, electrical engineer Alan Blumlein patented stereo records, stereo movie sountracks and surround sound. His equipment was used to make some of the first stereo recordings at EMI's Abbey Road studios - several decades before the technology came into popular use. Blumlein went on to pioneer 405 line TV (the first wholly electronic format which won out over John Logie Baird's rival system) and to produce the equipment that made the first outside TV broadcast possible. At the outbreak of World War 2 he was a key architect of the secret H2S radar project. Unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash while testing the technology and the whole incident was kept secret. Hence he remains an obscure figure despite his achievements. A recent BBC Radio 4 program contains a lot of the archive stereo footage and tells his story.
posted by rongorongo on Aug 7, 2008 - 5 comments

What do you call capturing sound the way the human head hears it, that is, three-dimensionally? Nope, not stereo. Binaural recording. Holophonics. Dummy head (no, not you) recording. [more inside]
posted by artifarce on Jan 29, 2008 - 14 comments

SBaGen is software (Windows, Mac and Linux) that generates binaural beats - interactions between sound waves that mess with your brain, to induce sleep, relaxation, activity, and allegedly even hallucinogenic states. SBaGen relies on text-file presets (although it comes with dozens of files to experiment with) but if you want a "quick start", there's also the Windows-based Brain Wave Generator.
posted by Jimbob on Mar 20, 2004 - 15 comments