read this interview transcript. tell me which topics are mentioned, and tell me from which minute to which minute are pieces of each topic spoken about, and specify -in your opinion- the most interesting parts of each topic:

00:00:27:26 - 00:00:55:05
Desconocido
Yeah. If you just want to. Why don't you just go ahead? Like, pretend it's like your, you know, your deal, like you're interviewing me, but, you know, we'll just. Yeah, you can just. We don't. We could just. I mean, I would just say we do very, very short introduction, and there it is.

00:00:55:05 - 00:01:25:20
Desconocido
Jump right in to talking about stuff.

00:01:25:22 - 00:01:40:11
Desconocido
Yeah. Yeah. Then thanks for, for talking to me is great.

00:01:40:14 - 00:02:03:15
Desconocido
I'd say it started back when I was in college and I was introduced to the new human head. The microphone that's shaped like the human head, right? And I heard some recordings that were used with that, and I thought it was pretty cool, you know? And I think there was a kind of like a YouTube video in like the early days of YouTube where there was a barbershop experience.

00:02:03:15 - 00:02:30:22
Desconocido
Someone was giving you a haircut, you know, and you were headphones and it's like, no, you know, it's so funny and weird. And I remember thinking at the time I was getting into surround sound in general, you know, 5.1, 7.1 stuff. And, and I discovered the binaural processor in logic. And so I was playing around with that and I just thought this is there's so much potential here, you know, this is so cool.

00:02:30:24 - 00:03:06:04
Desconocido
And, you know, I didn't really know what would become of it. I didn't really do much with it. In college. I was more concentrated on the live sound and stuff like this. But I just I saw a great potential for for this kind of technology. And, you know, obviously it's come a long way. Yeah, there's a there's a binary or spatial processor in logic.

00:03:06:04 - 00:03:32:22
Desconocido
It's just a plug in. And basically you can take a mono input source or a stereo input source. I think even you can take a surround input source and basically expand it around in a binary or space. You can do it in a a flat planar type of environment where it just moves around you or a spherical environment where you know it can move in a sphere around your head.

00:03:32:24 - 00:04:44:16
Desconocido
And so it's it's actually pretty good. So, you know, you can sort of mimic the sort of binaural spatial aspect with headphones that you would get if you'd done it with a binary microphone of sorts, which. Right. Yeah. I mean, the the spatial thing is interesting because there's a couple of initial challenges to it with, with, with conventional mixing where you just have mono sources or you have stereo sources, you know, like drum overheads or some kind of a stereo pair of microphones that are picking up like a choir or ambient microphones in a room.

00:04:44:19 - 00:05:17:09
Desconocido
Those tend to provide a very kind of like a direct sound. And a lot of times, you know, you get the proximity effect of the mike with things being closer to it, fuller frequency range with more direct signal to ambient noise, you know, and with the binaural microphone in a room, you, you do get you do get sort of more of a I would almost call it like a documentary style representation of what's happening in the room.

00:05:17:09 - 00:05:40:28
Desconocido
It's it's like this is literally what it would sound like if you were just, you know, standing here. And that's that can be true and it can be pretty convincing. That's not always the way that we want to hear music, you know? And I noticed that when I would listen to musical recordings that were done in a by natural sense, and I'd be like, well, like, for example, take a simple example, like a kick drum, right?

00:05:41:01 - 00:06:10:14
Desconocido
If you're standing at you know, a band, you know, rehearsal in a room listening to the drummer, and you're listening to the sound of the kick drum as it sounds to you standing there ten feet away from it or something. Okay. But that's not that's not the sound we want out of a kick drum. That's not the experience musically that we associate with a kick drum, unless it's certain types of music, like maybe jazz, you know, or something like this, maybe big band, you know, in more of a period sense.

00:06:10:14 - 00:06:31:06
Desconocido
But like the sound of a kick drum as we've come to know, it is literally the sound of a certain singular type of microphone that's placed inside of the kick drum and then put through a ginormous amplification system with subwoofers and all of the sonic peculiarities that subwoofers in sound systems.

00:06:31:06 - 00:06:36:22
Desconocido
bring to that equation. That total final sound is the sound of a kick drum that's musically satisfying.

00:06:36:22 - 00:06:37:07
Desconocido
You're not going to

00:06:37:07 - 00:07:07:19
Desconocido
get that now. You could set that all up and then put a binary microphone in a situation where there's a sound system and try to record that with the binary on mic. But then then one issue there is when you're listening to that recording, you are sort of like separating yourself from the from the, the physical reality of being there in that space and actually experiencing the the sense of the room.

00:07:07:19 - 00:07:30:07
Desconocido
It's not just, you know, the it's not just your sense of hearing. It's it's the sight, it's the smell. It's the physicality of being in the space that kind of all comes together in this experience that when you just isolate the audio aspect of it and you're sitting in your armchair and you're listening to a rock concert with binaural, you know, with a with a with headphones in a a binary microphone having been placed in the room.

00:07:30:09 - 00:07:52:03
Desconocido
Again, you can kind of get this like documentary style experience, but it's it's just not it's it's not the same. And that that's where I thought, you know this technology has these like certain benefits, but it also has certain limitations. And I thought that a lot of the early ways that the binaural technology was being used for musical recording purposes was like a mishandling of it.

00:07:52:03 - 00:08:28:08
Desconocido
They just didn't realize what was good about this and also what was kind of weak about this technology. And a lot of the early attempts I saw were sort of like utilizing what I thought were the weakest aspects of the technology, not potentially the strongest aspects of, well, there's certain things I thought that could be done to enhance the binaural technology.

00:08:28:08 - 00:09:12:09
Desconocido
And like what? What is it good at doing? Let's enhance those aspects of it. And so there's a couple of things that that came to mind initially in that was like the the need to balance the binaural experience of the total space with direct sounds that were used to in a mix. So is there a way to augment a Bino recording with more direct imports from like for example, if you had the experience of of a kick drum, you know, so you've got the binary recording of the, of the space with the band, but you're also somehow mixing in the more direct sound from a microphone having been placed inside the kick drum.

00:09:12:09 - 00:09:37:06
Desconocido
Is there a way to do this and find a balance there? Is there a way to augment or enhance the sense of space by having motion so instead of everything being static? Because that's another thing I experience is that when you have a static environment where the sound sources aren't moving, there's nothing about the environment that's changing. The binary microphone is staying in one place.

00:09:37:08 - 00:10:07:19
Desconocido
I sort of likened it to, you know, how we think some reptiles are or their vision is based on motion, right? And if nothing moves, they just they can't see things that kind of happens to the binaural sense when there's no relative motion in the space. If everything's static, you kind of you like lose the sense of the 3D aspect to the space and then it flattens out to like just a bad version of a stereo recording.

00:10:07:19 - 00:10:31:17
Desconocido
So like a weak kind of like anemic ambient sounding stereo recording that's like, you know, it's like, it's like, it's like you're like little recorder. You set up the front of house console for your own rehearsal purposes, not the, not the studio professional recording that was done, you know what I mean? So, yeah, experimenting with motion in the space to keep the relative sense of the binary all happening.

00:10:31:19 - 00:11:02:03
Desconocido
I don't know. Yeah. So there was just it just felt like there was a lot of attempts that were being made that were based on a more philosophical approach to the technology. Like this is the correct way to do this. That resulted in a lot of these like anemic types of recordings that nobody actually wanted to listen to.

00:11:02:06 - 00:11:43:18
Desconocido
Well, yeah. And and so, you know, unfortunately, I actually haven't published much work that I've done with binaural processing that that actually does a lot of these things. I, I have, you know, experimented with that. I say, you know, this is like the better way to do it. I actually have just sort of put up more traditional style binary recordings where I just put the I just put I just put the head, you know, in one spot and then record, you know, something that's that static.

00:11:43:20 - 00:12:06:15
Desconocido
And like I kind of admit, like I listen to my own recordings and I go, Yeah, it's sort of it isn't as impressive as I want it to be. I just haven't had the opportunity yet because it's not like my full time thing, you know, I'm doing live sound. These are total experiments. But, but, but how it came about in the first place was just that when, when, when COVID hit and everyone, you know, was sort of like not doing live sound and stuff, I decided I'm bored out of my mind.

00:12:06:15 - 00:12:30:04
Desconocido
I want to do something. So, you know, I decided to like, put together a kind of mobile recording package and find some some players, classical music players that that, you know, would want to run around and do some stuff. And then the idea was, you know, we would stream it live to people wearing headphones. Unfortunately, we never got that far.

00:12:30:04 - 00:12:54:19
Desconocido
The live event industry sort of picked up again enough that that took up all my time. But I did take some basically we made some test recordings to just see if the technology, the whole setup in the mobile recording package would even work. And I just decided to post those on YouTube and I had this whole technology sort of like brand around it called Alpha Stream, which involved the binaural technology and some other stuff that you talk about.

00:12:54:19 - 00:13:11:01
Desconocido
But like that we all I got around to doing was just posting a couple of basic Bino recordings in the sort of more traditional style that I actually don't really like. It were more just as a proof of concept that like, this could work. Like, first of all, can we even do stuff during COVID? This is a big question.

00:13:11:01 - 00:14:08:07
Desconocido
So those recordings still are just out there. But yeah, unfortunately, I just I personally have not been able to do much serious work that that does a lot of these things that I really hope that other people are doing with with the binary all tech. Yeah. So that was part of the alpha stream concept initially was just that we needed to figure out how to get high quality audio to potential listeners on the internet.

00:14:08:07 - 00:14:31:09
Desconocido
And the big problem, of course, is just that you don't have control. You don't have end to end control of what's going on. You can put great sounding content out into the, you know, Internet, but like you don't know what devices people are going to be listening on. This is like a general problem, right? It's not unique to like binary audio or anything is, you know, So then you know, the best bet as well.

00:14:31:09 - 00:14:50:11
Desconocido
You know, go tell everybody to buy like super expensive studio headphones, you know, so that they can have a great experience. Well, that's not going to happen. So I was like, well, why can't we just have people buy? Like, there's got to be a way to get cheap headphones to sound good. And this is where I went on this little journey.

00:14:50:13 - 00:15:17:22
Desconocido
I actually went into a store and this actually makes me sound like a terrible person. But I went and I, I, I bought a bunch of headphones. I justified because they wouldn't let me demo them, but I was like, okay, fine, what's your return policy? So I just, like bought a bunch of headphones, cheap headphones, expensive headphones, took them out to my car in a parking lot and basically just did like a big comparison between all of them.

00:15:17:24 - 00:15:41:20
Desconocido
And I was very surprised, just based on sound quality alone. My two favorite ones were like a $400 pair of headphones, like a nice studio style period ones, and then this little cheap $10 pair of these Sony buds. And I was like really blown away by the Sony buds just out of the gate. And I was like, okay, there's there's a couple of properties that make them grab my attention.

00:15:41:22 - 00:16:02:25
Desconocido
They they get loud without sounding super distorted. They have a super wide frequency range, like they go all the way down to DC basically. So the low frequency extension is really, really good and they don't like get weird and distorted sounding. I like that they're buds, so they completely seal in your ear rather than being like big over the head style cans.

00:16:02:27 - 00:16:32:19
Desconocido
They're cheap. I bought a couple different pairs of them later on to see if the consistency was the same. The sound of them was the same. And now, years and years later, I keep buying various pairs and keep comparing them to the old the old buds and they have a really consistent sound. So then I basically just sat around and developed a processing this basically just like a IQ that that makes them sound really, really smooth.

00:16:32:22 - 00:16:54:02
Desconocido
And I've since compared them against really high end headphones and custom, you know, in-ears and stuff like this. And I mean, I can't say that like they sound as good with the processing as like $1,000 pair of custom In-Ears those probably sound a little bit better. But the point is for $10, you know, and a little bit of IQ, they sound pretty good.

00:16:54:05 - 00:17:18:03
Desconocido
And at least what you get from that is the consistency. The end to end, you know exactly what hardware the end user is going to be listening to your content on. And then you can ahead of time, tweak the sound of your content into perfection for that piece of hardware specifically, just like a live sound engineer does for live sound.

00:17:18:05 - 00:17:48:16
Desconocido
Right? You have your sound system in the room right then right there, kind of a one night only experience. You tailor the mix to that system in that room in that moment, and the experience that the audience gets is this combination of an end to end control of all the hardware involved. So, you know, that experience can actually be a better I found a better sonic experience with it being perfectly tailored to even a cheap pair of headphones by a good engineer that's tailoring this to even a cheap pair of headphones.

00:17:48:24 - 00:18:11:24
Desconocido
That experience can be better than as sort of like a generic mix created for just randomly good pairs of headphones or like a nice studio pair of headphones. That's great. But the mix has been like tailored not for that specific pair, even as good as it is, but just for like a generic mix. It's tailored for every type of device, every condition.

00:18:11:26 - 00:18:31:25
Desconocido
And in that way you can't like either. You can't be super. There's ways in which you could you could be even more specific about how it sounds that are just better. I think overall in a lot of cases. So ironically, you actually could potentially get a better sonic experience doing it this way with the cheap headphones just because it's known in advance exactly what they're listening to.

00:18:31:25 - 00:19:06:07
Desconocido
That's very powerful. It's a very powerful insight. So that combined with the binaural aspect, I felt like there was just a lot of potential there that unfortunately I personally just did not get to pursue. But you know, and I know that I know that there's people doing great work in like gaming and stuff, but on the on the musical front, I just really haven't heard, you know, something that just really wows me that I'm like from a from a musical side, like, like, wow, this is really happening.

00:19:06:07 - 00:21:05:02
Desconocido
And this is like the way this technology should be used. Yeah, I haven't really I haven't really bumped into that yet. It I haven't really tried that. I do know that there are some companies that make devices that you can like put a headphone either on or put like a earbud in and it will, you know, take a measurement of the frequency curve of that and and and then, you know, do what with it.

00:21:05:02 - 00:21:48:00
Desconocido
I don't know. Some will maybe do like a counter curve or something like this or but you know I I've thought about that at least what I thought about doing at one point was actually taking and making the same kinds of IQ settings, at least in a program like Logic that I had made for this particular headphone, right, the Sony X15 LP, and just doing that for like a wide range of headphones and then kind of maybe having an app developer create a kind of like app that you could download on your phone that you know, would basically take over the, you know, the audio from the device and process it in this way.

00:21:48:00 - 00:22:10:18
Desconocido
So you could always just like select which headphone brand you're using and then it will apply that IQ, you know, to your audio out on your device. You know because I tried it. There are a couple of apps like that, you know, but they're not very good. I've never found one that's very good. They're also generic, you know, they're they're so the IQ curve is obviously very, very generic.

00:22:10:18 - 00:22:39:19
Desconocido
And like, you know, and still sometimes sometimes I'm like, it's different, but I don't even know if it's better. Like wasn't an improvement. I'm not sure the EQ setting that I use for these headphones is like really, really specific. And so like it literally does not sound good on any other headphones. It's so weird the specific that you know, So if you're not going to use that particular set of headphones, it doesn't matter if you have like the world's best headphones.

00:22:39:26 - 00:23:02:04
Desconocido
It'd be better if you just didn't have the process. And if you're not using this specific pair of headphones. But, you know, and that came about because I was so frustrated with logic recording projects in college that I was working on. I would send them around to various people, either collaborators or, you know, people that like I wanted second opinions on.

00:23:02:06 - 00:23:25:16
Desconocido
And, you know, I would get feedback about the mics and stuff and I would go, I just I don't agree with that assessment now. But but, but what device are you listening on? They're like, Well, I took a listen on my phone or something. You know, it's just like, I'm like this is okay. We need to do we need to have a more consistent way of people experiencing this, that then they their opinions can be can be meaningful.

00:23:25:16 - 00:23:47:19
Desconocido
It can be meaningful data points. Right? So I started sending people, you know, like back then it was a USB stick. You had your logic project on the little USB stick and I would send them with the project. I would send a little a pair of headphones with the USB stick and say, Listen to this project with these headphones because on the master bus there's an E queue meant for them.

00:23:47:21 - 00:24:04:10
Desconocido
And then don't tell me what you think about it until you've done that. You know, don't listen on some other device. I'll listen in your car and listen on your little rocket speakers or your or, you know, your whatever studio headphones you have no listen to it on these headphones and then tell me what you think. That way I at least know that we heard the same thing.

00:24:04:12 - 00:24:34:21
Desconocido
So that that's kind of how that came about, you know, and, and that and that combined with the sense that the Q curve needs to be really specific. And that was something that I learned pretty quickly on, was that like, it's the tolerances. The human ear is so sensitive to tonal changes and what you, what your brain interprets as natural is a really, really narrow window.

00:24:34:24 - 00:25:01:14
Desconocido
And so there's what your brain interprets as acceptable given a certain context is really wide. So like I did a video with like demonstrating how like with a snare drum e Q There's a lot of different X you could apply or an electric guitar, you know, there's a lot of different X that one could apply that most people listening would consider musically acceptable to the range is very, very wide.

00:25:01:17 - 00:25:36:20
Desconocido
But when it comes to something like a violin, the X curve that you apply to that microphone in the recording, it can't vary too much from, you know, what would be considered natural given the combination of the of the mic and the recording and also the headphones you're listening on or whatever, like the end result in your ears needs to fit a very, very narrow window sonically from it, from a a balance, a frequency standpoint, the contour right tonal contour is a very narrow window to shoot for, or else your brain will kind of red flag it and say, this isn't natural.

00:25:36:22 - 00:26:17:00
Desconocido
Now, whether it's musically acceptable, that's different because maybe it's an electric violin or maybe it's, you know, some kind of like experimental, you know, avant garde cello. But if the goal if the point is if there's a context here that you're assuming that this is supposed to accurately represent the way it would sound, naturally that window gets very narrow very quickly and that's and so, you know, that that's that's that's one thing that, you know, I noticed early on was that the for binaural purposes there's it's like once you put the headphones on and you hear that the 3D sense of the binaural technology, your brain is already automatically operating in a kind of sense

00:26:17:02 - 00:26:35:22
Desconocido
that like this is supposed to sound a certain way. There's a, there's like a known standard here and that is natural. What would it sound like naturally if I were actually there? That's very, very different than like listening to a pair of stereo speakers in a room and recordings of a pop band with snare and electric guitar. And you know what I mean?

00:26:35:24 - 00:27:10:25
Desconocido
That there's there's it's a totally different thing to shoot for, different goal in mind and the tolerances, you know, get very, very low very quickly. And so that yes that that was that was very important. And I saw a lot of people missing the mark on that because when you put a pair of headphones in and you know, you're listening to music that's recorded in a binary sense, they may have done a great job with the spatial aspect of it, but since there's no control of the tonal aspect of it, there's already a red flag.

00:27:10:28 - 00:27:36:12
Desconocido
Your brain is already telling you, This isn't like it's not truly convincing. I'm not disappearing into this space. You know, I'm not getting this sense of like being lost in this space and being convinced by it. And, you know, that's because the tonal tolerances are just way off. They haven't got they haven't got control of that yet. So, yeah, there's just a lot of things that need to come into alignment to get this technology to work well.

00:27:36:12 - 00:28:01:22
Desconocido
You have to have the spatial aspect still needs to be worked on. I think, you know, we've already talked about that. The tonal aspect that we just talked about that needs to be really worked on. There has to be some solution. There. So, you know, those those are at least those are like two big things that I see as as real problems that still have not been addressed at a popular level by people trying to apply the binaural technology to music.

00:28:01:22 - 00:28:04:24
Desconocido
super interesting. I think what most of the people

00:28:34:14 - 00:29:26:23
Desconocido
Yeah, in a Yeah. I mean, so, you know, the immersive thing is kind of the wild, Wild West right now. You know, there's every everyone's experimenting and trying their own stuff and you know, it, it, there's, there's a lot of different things that could be talked about because it's not just about what you can dream up in the live sound industry.

00:29:26:23 - 00:29:51:17
Desconocido
A lot of it is what's feasible. You know, there's there's lots of things that we could think would be cool to do, but also like, can we do it? And, you know, if you're going to develop some kind of method or platform, it needs to be something that isn't just like specific to one, you know, venue or one particular artist that has all the money to throw at it with like, you know, a zillion crew members and time.

00:29:51:17 - 00:30:21:05
Desconocido
And it's like, you know, a lot of companies are trying to find like, what can we do that can also be can be done by, you know, smaller regional companies like Alpha Sound, for example. You know, what could we do that is immersive, that is backed by, you know, the brands that we sell and not just some like one off concoction that, you know, that we do for our events, which I've done before, I've I've done a lot of immersive stuff, but it's always just been of my own making in my own experimentation.

00:30:21:07 - 00:30:43:18
Desconocido
I'm not using anybody's been a platform, you know, there's obviously the big ones out there, you know, there's acoustics. Lisa There's, you know. Maya They have their constellation. There's more for like installations and there's, you know, dub soundscape. There's, there's, you know, there's a bunch of a look, there's the new like hollow plots speakers, you know, in the, the Sphere in Vegas, you know, that's a big deal.

00:30:43:20 - 00:30:55:09
Desconocido
And you know, there's, you know, like Yamaha has, you know, they're EFC for they call this image and enhance, you know, and there's like various

00:30:55:13 - 00:30:56:20
Desconocido
platforms out there.

00:30:56:20 - 00:31:10:27
Desconocido
I'm not using any of them right now because none of them make economical sense. I still think there's like stuff about them that, you know, I do for, for my purposes at this point in time, it just makes more sense for me to do it myself.

00:31:10:29 - 00:31:40:08
Desconocido
But maybe that'll change. But again, I think I think that like, you know, there's basically at least two ways to think about doing the immersive thing. There's like the more, I don't know, I would call it like playful or sometimes maybe gimmicky, like a way of doing it, like bringing that aspect of it to the front and center of the experience.

00:31:40:08 - 00:32:04:12
Desconocido
Like, look, we can put the saxophones behind. You know, there's now saxophones behind you and that cool you know, or just like stuff like this, you know, like obviously, you know, for other applications like theater, it's super fun to have special effects, you know, Thunder from behind. You were scream from over there or whatever or something flying around you in space, you know, for for the home theater world.

00:32:04:12 - 00:32:29:13
Desconocido
Right. That's made a lot of sense for for years and years for movies. But yeah, for the for the musical thing, I think people are still trying to find what the what the point or purpose of this is. And you know, for like, for like classical music applications, a lot of the point has been to try to bring a sense of an acoustic space to places that have an imperfect or nonexistent acoustic space, you know.

00:32:29:13 - 00:32:55:09
Desconocido
So this has been something I've been trying to do, is concentrate more on that. To do classical music in in a way where, let's say you wanted to do have like a chamber orchestra outdoors somewhere and then you wanted to recreate an acoustics space. We did an event with a local orchestra a couple of years ago at a winery, and it was out on the crushing pad and the winery.

00:32:55:11 - 00:33:27:24
Desconocido
Beautiful views of the surrounding vineyards outdoors. But we set up a surround sound system and made it sound like it was in like an acoustic hall, you know? And so that was, you know, those are really fun. I've done a bunch of stuff like that, but so far that's kind of been like the thing that I've gravitated towards is, is creating a sense of 3D space for the sound that's being otherwise amplified normally through a traditional, I would suppose, like a stereo pair of speakers like you would normally think of doing.

00:33:27:24 - 00:33:53:22
Desconocido
But I haven't really done a whole lot of the sort of thing where you take the sound sources and spread them around and have them fly around like Tinker Bell. Like that's not really I haven't really done a lot of that, so I don't know. yeah, Well, either way, don't we just why don't we just use three started now.

00:33:53:25 - 00:34:09:18
Desconocido
It's a good, a good a good break. Let me make sure make sure all my other.

00:34:09:18 - 00:34:39:23
Desconocido
Well, if that if the if the Zoom video sucks, then we have to just do this again. I'm fine with that too. Second. There you go. Yeah. No second time's a charm if it comes to that. I don't mind us doing it again. That's weird. I don't know. I. Yeah. Okay, well, whatever. If the strange is working, the audio start recording.

00:34:39:23 - 00:37:18:29
Desconocido
Fine. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So. Okay, so. So, yeah, because I have a couple of things I'd like to ask you. Yeah. Yeah. That definitely is a certain like, goal of the immersive, you know, and like you have like, like l acoustics the Lisa set up, you know, you have like a bunch of line arrays across the front and you know, that's kind of the idea there is, you know, so a couple of thoughts on that.

00:37:19:01 - 00:37:59:16
Desconocido
I think that one component that hasn't really been solved is the ability to have some kind of of a way to take a mono source and split it between multiple output sources. But what needs, what needs to happen is that the signals need to be changed. They need to be different from one another, just enough to break up the sort of I'm trying to figure out a way to say this.

00:37:59:16 - 00:38:24:11
Desconocido
Like if you if you had two speakers and you had it pinned mono, you're going to get a phantom center right now. You need to figure out a way to to change the way forms of those two sounds sufficiently that they don't sound like two different things, but that you break you break them up enough that like, there's no there's no phantom center anymore.

00:38:24:12 - 00:38:59:25
Desconocido
They're they're very distinctly separate channels of audio. But if you were to listen to them each in isolation, you wouldn't and then go back and forth, you wouldn't hear a difference. So this is true for things like, you know, a drum overheads, you know, So if you put a stereo pair of, of, of, you know, drum overheads or you have like a choir and you have like a stereo pair in front of a choir or even just like in a room, an ambient stereo pair of microphones, if you listen to each individual one and you go back and forth, you're probably not gonna be able to tell which is which.

00:38:59:27 - 00:39:23:07
Desconocido
But if you listen to them at the same time and you pan them left and right, you're not going to hear a phantom center because they're there. The fact that they're spread out in space, especially for the mid and high frequencies, obviously, you know, for lower frequencies, you know, starts to collapse back into mono. But like for mid and high frequencies, you know, they're they're they're differentiated just enough that they don't correlate like 100%.

00:39:23:07 - 00:40:02:10
Desconocido
And you know, they are now like you don't have this phantom center but they're not differentiated enough that they're not still like married in space, like in a stereo field. They're still like each other enough that like they still sound like they go together and they make sense stereoscopic leave in that way, you know, or stereo, you know, sonically, like they don't, you know, like they, they still belong together because let's say for here's a simple test of let's say you took two microphones and had them right next to each other and you're recording a choir, you pan those two microphones left, right, you're going to get Phantom Center more or less, and you spread

00:40:02:10 - 00:40:19:27
Desconocido
them out by like six inches or eight inches or so, the distance of your ears. Now you listen to those in stereo and you're going to have this like nice stereo field that makes sense. But the wider you get, like if you take the two microphones and spread them like way out, then they just become two totally separate.

00:40:19:29 - 00:40:38:26
Desconocido
Microphones and can end up sounding so different from each other that from a psycho acoustic standpoint, they're not married anymore as a stereo pair. So. So the real question is we need to come up with some kind of processing trick that takes a singular source, like a microphone, a single microphone, picking up the sound of like my voice right.

00:40:38:26 - 00:40:59:13
Desconocido
And separates it somehow. There's for example, there's like apps and or plug ins that will do like stereo spreading. So they'll take the one signal and they'll add like some phase shift, you know, to the different frequencies in this way. But then they'll take a different set of frequencies and add phase shift. And it's just an a face shift that you can get left and right.

00:40:59:13 - 00:41:31:15
Desconocido
And it kind of breaks up the phantom center. But to be honest, that kind of sounds weird. And, you know, it's it's it's like, you know, there's one trick that I found was actually to make a impulse response of a very, very small space that had a lot of, like, jagged edges and stuff like this. Like, imagine it's just a small closet filled with random stuff, basically, and take an impulse response of that, like, in effect, take a mono source and put it into that effect.

00:41:31:15 - 00:41:55:05
Desconocido
And the effect the the impulse was made with a stereo pair. So now you have like the super, super short effect that's almost so short, it doesn't register as an effect, like a room sound in your brain. It's so short, but it's just enough. The sound bounces around and gets picked up by the stereo pair of microphones in the in the impulse response.

00:41:55:05 - 00:42:23:02
Desconocido
It's just enough to break up that mono source so that it can be spread across to help with sources like a stereo pair of speakers or headphones, for example. And so and not have a phantom center, but still kind of be like married in a stereophonic way. Like it's. And I thought, well, that could just be spread across, you know a lot of speakers you could have and there's there's nothing about this that just couldn't be done in real time with processing.

00:42:23:04 - 00:42:51:05
Desconocido
So you could have some kind of processor that, for example, says, I'm going to take a mono source and if I want to divvy it among two or among three or among five speakers, I can provide a version of that mono for each of those that you can then spread it across. And so then you could have this sort of like ambiguous field coming from an original mono source, a microphone or on an instrument, but it could be spread across five or seven line array speakers.

00:42:51:05 - 00:43:24:16
Desconocido
And like the L acoustics Lisa fashion that you know, would, it would eliminate the phantom centers that would occur in between each individual line or a speaker compared with another right in the stereo field in that way. But you could spread it across all the speakers because my fear about mixing in an environment where you have to just pick one of the line arrays for each sound object if you want to avoid any of the phantom centering between any of the arrays, is that then your mics just consist of a bunch of mono things in.

00:43:24:18 - 00:43:53:29
Desconocido
So you have a bunch of speakers, but each individual speakers only outputting like one sound source, like a microphone on stage. And you know, there's something to be said about having a wider, a wider sound field, right? And so then, you know, you could accomplish this. Obviously, just the room itself can give you that, right? Even if you just put a singular sound source, like a sound output source, like a speaker into a room, it's going to bounce around or you're going to have a wider sound field anyway.

00:43:54:07 - 00:44:11:06
Desconocido
You can recreate that with like an impulse response of a room or a stage or a hall with the remaining speakers. But what if you could just do that with the dry signal itself? Then you could spread the dry signal around in this way. I think that would be a really powerful processing tool to to offer. And, you know, maybe maybe somebody is already working on that.

00:44:11:06 - 00:44:34:20
Desconocido
Maybe that already exists and I just don't know about it. But I've been poking around. I've been asking the best of the best, you know, for four years now, does this exist? Is there a way to, like, do this and, you know, no, no one really seem to come up with an answer for me. Either that or they just want to tell me maybe maybe everyone's keeping me in the dark.

00:44:34:22 - 00:46:41:08
Desconocido
But right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, I also think about the the need for better control of of that panning. So for example, when you're, you know, there's different interfaces that the companies have come up with for you're going to drag a dot around on a screen and put it where you want relative to the speakers in the venue and stuff.

00:46:41:10 - 00:47:07:25
Desconocido
I think that there's got to be a whole new revolution in how we even think about how to control that aspect of it. And I'm thinking like, what if there are like peripherals and this is a big thing in general. I'm surprised that like, this just isn't a thing. Like the idea of using peripherals, like in the gaming world, peripherals or everything, things you attach to your body or your hands or, you know, in the musical world too, people are experimenting with this like interesting ways of having peripherals that attach to your body or instruments or things that do things.

00:47:07:28 - 00:47:28:25
Desconocido
In the world of audio, we're still like pushing on a screen and turning knobs and sliders. Like why? Why don't we like, how come you don't have, you know, like a, an IQ that you can just draw with your finger in a sort of like virtual screen above the console? Or how come you don't have gloves you can put on that, you can morph and shape sounds in ways or pan things, you know, or you know, like what?

00:47:28:25 - 00:47:48:07
Desconocido
Like why are we doing these things with peripherals, you know? So yeah, it's just like a whole, a whole, the whole world. But I'm, I'm curious like, you know, what have been some of the more interesting things that you've discovered, You know, I mean, I've watched some of your videos that you've put out with some of the minor work you've done, and they're really cool.

00:47:48:07 - 00:49:26:20
Desconocido
You know, I think he did a commercial for it was an Audi. And, you know, so there's been some other things you've done was like, so what what has been you know, like like yeah, just talk to me about like what has been a challenge for you or what are some of the more interesting things that you've thought about experimenting with, sort of looking forward to the tech of, of, you know, the potential of binaural technology?

00:49:26:22 - 00:51:23:00
Desconocido
Yeah. It's so I'm curious. Yeah. So, so here's a question for you in general. When you're dealing with microphones and, you know, one of the hardest things to manage is the low frequency response of the microphone, especially when you're, you know, like, for example, if you're taking it out, like on a subway or in an environment, you know, I noticed this with my, you know, binaural experimentations, you know, the way a microphone will pick up low frequency sound and then the way that you experienced that when you put it through a sound system, were where headphones, for example, is just really different psycho acoustically than the way you actually experience it

00:51:23:03 - 00:51:47:29
Desconocido
in person. So when you like, for example, you know, you put up a binary microphone in the outdoors, I mean the slightest breeze or just like the literal, just like the car driving a half a mile away on a freeway, there will be like a rumble there. You know what I mean? There's like a there's a low frequency element there that I guess is sort of technically accurate.

00:51:47:29 - 00:52:19:07
Desconocido
Like that is what was happening in the air. But that's just psycho acoustically, not how you experience it in that moment. Like you don't even it doesn't even register that that exists, you know, you but, but, but you like notice it when you go listen to the recording later so I a lot of times found myself having to sort of cheat in some of my binaural recordings and basically take and either use like a high pass filter on the binaural system where I would high pass it at like 100 hertz or whatever.

00:52:19:09 - 00:52:43:10
Desconocido
And then I would mix in elements from, you know, so-called like spot microphones that were actually placed on instruments that had lower sounds to them that were more clean or direct sound of the low frequency. And then I would I would reintroduce those into the binary recording so that like everything below 100 hertz was a lot more controlled in the more traditional sense.

00:52:43:12 - 00:53:05:21
Desconocido
And then everything above 100 hertz was coming from the binary mic and was experiment, you know, experiencing the space and everything like that. And I don't know, I have had certain thoughts like maybe this could be an air thing one day where the A.I. listens to the low frequency content in relation to the whole mix and strips the noise and just leaves the clean base that should be there.

00:53:05:24 - 00:55:05:13
Desconocido
So it's more psycho acoustically pleasing. Well, what are your thoughts about this going forward? Like with with how to handle low frequency in the binaural space? Right. Yeah. I'm curious what you think about the idea of using multiple binaural microphones systems in the same recording. Does does it does it always need to just be the one binary microphone or what do you think about having combinations of different binaural microphones in the same recording environment with this, this, does that work?

00:55:05:13 - 00:57:24:08
Desconocido
Or, you know, are there benefits to that? Is it is it just like a problem? Right. Yeah. Right. Do you think that using binary microphones like the three duo product, you know, which those are great. Obviously, I use the three. Do you like using literal, physical, binaural microphones that are shaped like human ears and doing all this stuff?

00:57:24:10 - 00:57:48:00
Desconocido
Just like how movie special effects went from practical effects to just being all CGI? Do you feel like like, like I pointed out in logic, there's the there's the binaural processor, right? So you don't even have to have the microphones. It's all just done with with processing, you know, kind of like how reverbs are now, like impulse response based or some of them are real time modeled, right?

00:57:48:00 - 00:58:05:09
Desconocido
So this is another big thing if you look at it like mode art and what they're doing with real time model instruments, right, where it's not even like a real instrument was modeled. It's just it's just the mathematical algorithms that would predict what a physical model of this instrument would do acoustically in real time. It's just it's number crunching.

00:58:05:11 - 00:58:49:08
Desconocido
There's like, no RAM, it's all just processing power. Do you think that eventually we just won't ever be using binaural microphones at all, will be using some other type of microphone system that can capture a version of the sound in the space that then a processing algorithm will take and just recreate any binary processing you'd like. So for example, you could just like put on your pair of headphones and maybe you have maybe you can walk around a venue and the the binaural sound that you're experiencing is changing, the processing is changing that binary experience depending on where it knows you are in the venue and how you've turned your head and stuff like this.

00:58:49:08 - 00:59:06:23
Desconocido
Gaming already does. I think a little bit of this where, you know, if you turn your head like, like that microphone you have there, it will probably automatically switch between the different pairs of ears depending on, you know, how you did the recording. You could do that, for example. But you know, literally being able to just have just all of it will just be processing.

00:59:06:25 - 01:01:19:25
Desconocido
We won't even use, you know, or the Or do you think that there will always be a place for the literal binaural head microphone in an environment like will there always just be a need for that right. Right. Not today. Yeah. I mean, you know, with with the advent of, like, A.I. speech production and, like, you can have a whole podcast now you know, between two people that never happened, like, and yeah, maybe we'll get replaced.

01:01:19:25 - 01:01:56:16
Desconocido
Like, maybe this is, maybe this is A.I.. Maybe we're not even here right now. And, you know, everyone's going to wonder if we actually had this conversation because just an air bot, they created this. But, but, but, but that, you know, I mean, joking aside, like, the reality is that like I'm not sure why in principle you couldn't just have an AI grab a hold of like a, you know, physical modeling program for an instrument and you know, play a song on a virtual violin that then was piped through an algorithm that created that sound in a virtual concert hall for, you know, a set of, you know, headphones a person was wearing that were

01:01:56:16 - 01:02:23:00
Desconocido
sensitive to their physical motion and their location within a venue so they could walk around outside and they could set up, you know, like they could walk around in their backyard and turn their head and everything. And they are going to hear the sound of a violin being played in a acoustic church. there's and even the violin, the like the sound, the music, the whole thing is just all just generated by like A.I. in principle.

01:02:23:00 - 01:02:44:06
Desconocido
I'm not sure why it is like is impossible, but, you know, yeah, I think that, like, Yeah, we just. We could get to that point someday. We're just, like, CGI effects in movies. Like, you want to make an album? Maybe you're a singer songwriter. Okay, You can write down a song on a napkin, but like, you don't even have to sing it.

01:02:44:06 - 01:03:03:11
Desconocido
You can just, like, have the A.I.. It knows your voice and it can just like, have you sing that song and it has a whole band back behind you that's like, great and making creative musical decisions. And then it can be piped out to people in a by an oral sense. And it let's think ahead to something like the Neuralink you know that Elon Musk's working on where the sound is needed.

01:03:03:11 - 01:03:18:23
Desconocido
You only have to wear headphones. It just goes into your head and you just you just experience the sound. And maybe at that point then we get even beyond just the the sound that people talked about this for color, for example, like if you could bypass the retina and go straight to the brain with a visual interface, you could actually expand.

01:03:18:23 - 01:03:43:17
Desconocido
Or what we can see could be greatly expanded like insects and other animals, because maybe the brain's capable of receiving those input signals and making sense of them. But our physical our physical apparatus doesn't actually do that. But you could pipe those in directly. Maybe the same is true for audio. We could have ways of of experiencing sound that go beyond just the typical dynamic and frequency ranges and even spatial ranges that we're used to now.

01:03:43:19 - 01:04:02:04
Desconocido
Heck, just like you do with actual microphones where you put multiple microphones in different places and recombine them, you're sort of breaking the laws of physics in some sense. You know, you have like ears in multiple locations. It's like you took your ear off and put it in front of this instrument and took a year off and put it in front of and then recombine them like in a binary.

01:04:02:04 - 01:04:22:22
Desconocido
So since we're still thinking of this is why I asked earlier, you know, the possibility of combining multiple like we're still thinking of the auditory experience in a binary sense is like the singular sound source that's got the ears, you know? But what if you could cheat that? You know, what if there's a way to augment that and cheat a little bit and, you know, I mean, yeah, it's hard to imagine what that would even mean.

01:04:22:22 - 01:06:20:21
Desconocido
But, you know, it was just I don't know. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for now, we still have jobs. Yeah. And someday we'll be talking about the good old days. You know, when we still had jobs. I took over. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's exciting. Hey, you know what? This has been really fun.

01:06:20:21 - 01:06:49:16
Desconocido
We should do this again. I have, like, 80 more things I'd love to talk to you about, but I have to run. I'm sure we're both very busy. but. Yeah, yeah, this is great. Great chat, and, yeah, definitely do it again sometime. All right? Okay. So, hey, Okay, so, yeah, let's see. Yeah, This time, my phone.

01:06:49:16 - 01:06:58:20
Desconocido
recorded the whole thing just fine. I have no idea why it stopped the first time. So, Dom, maybe you maybe you can use the six good minutes and then switch to the zoom for, like, a little.

01:06:58:22 - 01:07:06:26
Desconocido
Anyway, I'll send all this to you and it shouldn't be, like, too bad to edit. I don't think it should be.