I get why listening to one earbud makes it sound like the music is only coming from that ear. But how’s come when I listen with two earbuds it seems like the sound is coming from the middle of my brain?
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You normally use both of your ears to locate the sound source, usually by turning the head and observing changes. Sound on one side of the head reaches the other ear with a delay, and it gets muffled by the shape of the ear when coming from behind. If it is beamed directly into one ear these mechanisms do not work and the brain is confused.
There are signal processors that adapt stereo steams meant for loudspeakers to headphones. One of the operations they do is mix a delayed copy of hard panned sounds into the opposite channel. This creates a more natural panning, but can’t be done by default for mono compatibility and encoding processes that downmix to mono.
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