FOSSPicks

Sound processor

Binaural Audio Editor

If you've not listened to binaural audio, you really need to give it a try. It's audio that's usually been recorded to mimic the position and dispersion of your ears with a chunk of dense matter between two microphones placed a few inches apart. Recordings need to be listened to through headphones, and a good recording can sound frighteningly realistic, often fully recreating the 3D stage of the recording environment. We say binaural recordings are "usually" recorded with two microphones, because the effect can be simulated in software, as can the 3D playback, and there are even open source plugins that let you create binaural audio from a mono audio file. Which is exactly what Binaural Audio Editor does.

The application consists of two main windows. The first is a 3D view of a cube. This represents you, the listener. You then need to add something called a sound producer. This is where your audio file will be played back from, and when its location isn't the same as the listener, it's represented in the 3D view by a turquoise cube in the same view. The position of both the listener and the audio producer can be changed from a couple of pop-up panels, but the clever part becomes evident in the second window. This lists x, y, and z values across a timeline for both the listener and the sound producer. You can click within any of these timelines to virtually change the position of your chosen object at that point in time. When you then play back the audio from the other window, the 3D location of both the listener and the sound source will change dynamically. You can't yet save this output, although it's easy to capture it, and the application itself is prone to crash. But the application is still new and in rapid development, so it's going to be a great project to follow.

Project Website

https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-editor

Use the x, y, and z timelines to generate real 3D audio and dynamically change the position of both the sound and the listener.

3D reconstruction

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