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'Sound City Project' Is A Google Street View For The Ears

David Vale has created an immersive 3D soundscape to virtually transport you to cities across the world.

"Soundhead" prototype. Images courtesy the artists

If you live in a city, walk out onto the street, shut your eyes, and listen to the sounds you can hear. Are they fragments of conversations? The sound of wind rustling? People arguing? Trains whooshing along? Drunk people screaming? The answers will be manifold, because living in a modern urban environment means sharing your space with all manner of noises.

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For their Sound City Project David Vale, Rick van Mook, and Caco Teixeira have created a 3D soundscape—which can be listened to online—of various cities, recording stereoscopic sounds from different areas to create an immersive sense of space and place in the comfort of your very own home. It's sort of like a growing Google Street View for the ears. But as the project is ongoing, new recordings and additions are continually being made.

"I wanted to create a tool where people could choose specific places in the world and get a better feeling of how it sounds, with no 'super production' value, but just showing the reality of it." explains Vale. "I wanted to make the sound experience as real as possible, as if you could close your eyes and imagine yourself into that place—something you can only achieve with 3D sound."

The High Line, NYC. Screenshot from Sound City Project

The sounds were recorded using a custom built 3D printed "soundhead" which has four ears, because the team needed at least four channels to capture stereoscopic sound. They designed the "head" in Maya, building it according to the anatomy of the human head, so the ears sit at the same distance apart, meaning they could include mechanisms like head related transfer function (HRTF) often used in video games (it allows users to hear a sound and pinpoint it in space, making a virtual experience much more realistic).

To ensure they could record 360° stereoscopic sound—rather than just simulating it in post production—Vale says they "Connected four omnidirectional microphones (one per each 'ear') into our 3D printed model and we recorded all the four tracks simultaneously. On the development, we merged the audio from all microphones into one 4-channel audio file. Based on the direction the user is looking at the site, we manipulate the volume of the individual channels for the left and right ear. So, when you’re looking north, you hear the west microphone in your left ear and the east microphone in your right ear. If you’re looking west, you hear the south microphone in your left ear and the north microphone in your right ear."

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The final "soundhead" design

So far they have recorded 64 locations across six cities including New York City, San Francisco, Bergen, Flåm, and Oslo in Norway, and Stockholm in Sweden. "Each location was hand-picked to bring a beautiful, yet rich audio experience for the user. We wanted more than just the 'urban' white noise that you would expect. Users can experience a range of sounds, including that of Times Square on a weekend to a moving train in the middle of a small village in Norway." says Vale.

Golden Gate Bridge, SF. Screenshot from Sound City Project

The plan is to open the project up for collaborations, live streaming, and possibly creating a downloadable kit with the "soundhead" for people to captue their own recordings, and expand to mobile. Eventually, perhaps, leading to a strange virtual setup where places aren't just mapped visually but aurally, too, we'll be able to take a tour on Street View where the sounds of that area can be heard, changing and shifting along with the visuals.

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