Auditory perception enables us to identify a sound by its pitch, timbre, intensity and length, differentiate it amidst other sounds, remember it, and determine where it comes from.
This last mechanism, sound localisation, is possible thanks to the fact that humans have two ears separated by a certain distance (the head’s diameter). Therefore, the sound they receive is hardly ever the same: the intensity of the sound is always greater in the ear that is closer to the sound’s source, which also receives it first. The auditory system can interpret these variations and deduce where the sound is coming from.
In this virtual experience, the binaural sound artificially recreates a 3D sound sensation similar to that of being physically in the place where the sounds are being produced. To achieve this, we have used technology that allows the different sound sources to be placed at any position in the space and to be heard with headphones.
The Postals Sonores de Barcelona installation uses this mechanism to reconstruct the 3D soundscapes of six city locations.