Lend Us Your Ears! Immersive Headphone Experiments
Posted by Chris Pike, Tom Nixon on , last updated
Last week was quite exciting for us in R&D's audio team. The Radio 4 home page featured not just one but two programmes that we've worked on in collaboration with our colleagues at Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio. This is part of our project and the aim is to create an improved immersive experience for those listening on headphones. First there was the online surround sound version of on Saturday 18th October (with a headphone surround option), followed by a special binaural headphone mix of the World War One drama on Tuesday 21st.
We are currently running online surveys for each of these experiments and would really appreciate your feedback.
The allows you to directly compare clips from the original stereo broadcast and the 3D headphone mix. We then ask for your preference between the two versions. The survey's audio player requires a web browser that supports the , such as the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox. The full 3D headphone mix of Tommies 21st October 1914 is available on .
Tommies survey page
The surround sound player for Under Milk Wood also has a . In this experiment we are converting the surround sound stream to a headphone surround signal in real-time, as explained in our . The intention with this survey is that you can try the different versions of processing that we have offered and then give feedback on your preference. The surround sound player requires a web browser that supports the Web Audio API and , currently Chrome is the only browser to support both of these features. For more details please see this .
Under Milk Wood surround sound player page
In both surveys we ask some supplementary questions about the way you listened and your listening habits. This is may help us to understand any patterns in listeners' preferences that we might observe.
If you are interested in this work and can take the time to listen, your feedback would be much appreciated. It should take approximately 15 minutes to fill in each survey. The results of this survey will help us to develop and improve what we're doing in the future.