I imagine
the most elementary state of our sensory experience. The beginning of our lives
during the embryonic phase in the womb. Our ears are not yet ears and do not
hear. Our body is surrounded by water and knows no orientation. Sounds move all
around us, we cannot hear, but vibrations touch our body. Differences in
intensity turn into a sense of distance and proximity. Spatial experience is
born. Although we seem to experience sound through our ears, this observation
shows that on a fundamental level, sound first appeals to physical sense.
It is clear that sound waves
are physically present in space and therefore interact not exclusively with the
ears, but with the entire body. Nevertheless, in general listening situations
physical sense of sound is only perceived subconsciously. The ears are
privileged to make us aware of sound because of the close neural connection
between the ears and the brain. Only under extreme circumstances one will
experience sound physically instead of cerebrally. One has to be literally
shaken to become aware of this dimension of sound.
Interesting enough, 4D Sound enhances a
strong awareness of physicality, not by means of extreme volumes but by evoking
a physical phantom. The source that causes the sound, which is not there but
virtually reproduced by the 4D Sound system, has to be cerebrally re-assured.
If we really hear something, it has to be true even though we know it is only
an illusion. Therefore sound is not only listened to. The physical source that
produces the sound is felt to be present as well. Through this involuntary synaesthetic
detour, 4D Sound has the potential to enlarge the experience of listening with
a new dimension – the conscious awakening of physical sense.
Physicality of sound has everything to
do with distance, or in fact being able to overcome distance and make the
listener experience the phantom source piercing right through the body. For
this we have to make the listener forget about the loudspeaker, since
localizing the actual sound source will always disturb the physical interaction
with the phantom source.
For a new approach of
this problem we considered that one could overrule the interaural cross
correlation, which is the mechanism behind the listener’s ability to localize
any non-virtual sound sources, i.e. the loudspeakers themselves. The resulted
‘Contiguous Phantom Imaging’ application, patented by Leo de Klerk in 2010,
describes a sound system that produces coherent interaction in the vertical and
horizontal plane in order to produce unlimited spatial images that cannot
monaurally nor binaurally be decomposed to their root sources, i.e. the actual
loudspeaker drivers. The loudspeaker becomes audibly non-localizable. As a
consequence the listening area is not anymore restricted to a ‘sweetspot’, the
listener can walk in and outside the speaker array and appreciate the same
image. One can physically explore 3-dimensional sonic shapes in space, can walk
around them, virtually touch them and walk through them.
As a consequence, in 4D Sound one does
not only listen to sound spatially, but experiences sound as an appearance of
physical energy.
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