In 8D audio, how is the audio able to sound like it’s behind or in front of you even though there are only left or right outputs?
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I studied acoustics at university, maybe i can help and hopefully not repeat anything that’s already been written
Many sounds you hear on a day to day basis, even in a musical sense, aren’t simple sine waves and tones, they’re a mix of many many different sounds that blend together to form a noise, this is usually called “resonant frequency”, which is why a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same frequency sound different.
Things can affect this, like the wood used in the instrument that might absorb more frequencies or mute certain frequencies letting our brains figure out that we might be hearing similar sounds, but they’re slightly different. –
Its similar to when we hear sounds on certain sides of our bodies or from certain distances, the further away it is, the quieter and lower the sound is, or if we hear a noise on the left side of our body, from our right ear, it’s lost some of the volume or resonant frequencies because they weren’t long enough to “curve” or “stretch” around our heads to our ear. – Meaning it is possible for people who are deaf in 1 ear to determine the location of something based on the sound.
Using that same logic, if we study how audio sounds from 8 separate locations, we can edit audio that is being produced in a stereo left to right field to emulate how sound changes as it goes forwards, backwards, left and right, or up and down.
if you were to start from square 1 and try to edit all the minor frequencies and audio levels from each sound produced to make it seem like it’s coming from a certain angle or from a certain distance, it would take you an eternity – one project of mine was to recreate the sound of different instruments using only basic sine waves and manually drawing in the amplitude changes to emulate the attack and decay of sounds – it took forever and that was only a handful of notes.
or if you were to understand the logic behind it, and program a computer to adjust the audio of a sound within a 3D field to produce something in “8D”, then it would be quite easy.
I used to work on audio for surround sound in a 12.1 surround sound studio (4 speakers at 3 separate levels and 1 bass woofer) and it was relatively easy to create a 3 dimentional matrix and track audio through it to make it sound like it was moving around you when you played back. and this was 14 years ago. so today it wouldn’t be too difficult.
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