Jun 22nd, 2014 - Category: Sound
The discussion of Choueiri’s 3D sound research at Princeton deserves a bit more attention. The New Yorker article was a fascinating mix of hard and soft science, but the author seemed to have a conflict between describing a breakthrough technology and his strong opinion that 3D sound solves the wrong problem. Gopnik writes, “The anxiety that produced the isolated urban listener in the concert hall is only aggravated by the technology that, pretending to liberate listening from the concert space, simply makes for more lonely domestic concert halls. The sweet spot on the sofa is a sad place to be.” In short, Gopnik seems to be saying that social isolation is the problem in music, not acoustic reproduction.
Still, not everybody is social and the author does do a thorough job explaining both complex physics as well as the social / psychoacoustic concepts involved. If you have a deeper interest in the research, Princeton’s 3D3A lab website has all the details.
If you don’t have time to read the article, the New Yorker podcast associated with the article explains it better (3:00 and 7:30 are the best parts). If you have less than five minutes, Discovery Channel posted a video interview (starts at 0:55) that is quite good at explaining the basic acoustics involved.
My opinion (in case you are interested), 3D sound does expand the soundscape, but sacrifices audio quality, especially vocals, so I have turned it off in the Jambox. However, it is still a major breakthrough and it has the potential to revolutionize aural acoustics in many ways especially in the field of sonification, the next topic in the “Acoustics Everywhere” series.