12 febrúar 2012
Dallas Simpson
Why would a rock band play live at talking volume, and in a separate room? To give their audience the unique immersive effect that only binaural sound can provide...
Dallas Simpson manoeuvres a ‘voice pipe’ around his head, while Swimming frontman John Sampson plays on.
It’s Friday night, and the packed cafe bar at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema is curiously silent. In the semi-darkness, a constellation of green LEDs shines forth. Projected onto the wall is what looks like a band rehearsal, except that a man is apparently performing t’ai chi moves with lengths of plumbing pipe.
In fact, the 150 or so audience members are enjoying a unique spectacle: a binaural gig. The band, local heroes Swimming, are performing in the same building, but in a small lounge at the other end of a corridor where they can’t be heard from the bar. Instead, the only connections between Swimming and their audience are the microphones in Dallas Simpson’s ears. He’s the man prowling the centre of the performance space, now standing still, now bending over or spinning round or placing his ear to a suspended sheet of metal. A hundred and fifty sets of wireless headphones, LEDs glowing, are conveying exactly what Dallas hears to every single audience member.
“The listeners listening on headphones are individually connected through me,” explains Dallas. “It’s a one-to-one relationship, through me, between the band and the listener. So it’s a very intimate setting; it’s as if the band’s playing in your own living room and I’m the conduit, the channel that transmits that experience to the listener.
“The band are playing their music — and they have to rewrite everything, because obviously it’s very different to a stage set. And then I take the sounds that the band’s presenting, and spatially choreograph the music in three-dimensional space around me. Some of it is pure listening, and some of it is using what I call ‘voice pipes’ to accurately direct the sound around my head to give that movement in three-dimensional space which is what binaural is all about, really.”
It Takes Two (Ears)
The bar area at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema during Swimming’s binaural gig. The tiny points of green light visible are LEDs from the audience’s wireless headphones.
For the uninitiated, binaural sound consists of reproducing as accurately as possible the sounds arriving at the ears of a listener. When replayed on headphones, this reproduction can offer a uniquely immersive representation of that individual’s listening experience, in which sounds appear to be outside the head, with amazingly precise localisation of sources. Unlike conventional stereo, binaural sound can even present positioning information in the vertical plane.
A long-term devotee of binaural sound, Dallas Simpson has developed a number of techniques, including his ‘voice pipes’ (see ‘Down The Pipes’ box) to take the immersive quality beyond simple realism and into the area of sound manipulation. But, as he explains, the immersive realism that is the main point of binaural sound is a delicate effect, and preserving it requires care, both on his part and that of the band.
“Because I’m using a very pure, personal binaural technique — in other words, inserting microphones into my ears — my head, ear and body shape is imposing a special shape on the sound,” explains Dallas. “If anyone who is listening has got exactly my head, body and ear shape, they’ll hear it exactly as I hear it; but because of genetic variations, most people will be different to varying degrees, which means that every single person will hear it slightly differently to how I hear it.”