Will Virtual Reality Get Lost in the Uncanny Valley Of Sound?
Visuals get the front page (for obvious reasons), but we’re quietly entering an age of more advanced speaker technology. Binaural audio, for instance, puts a microphone close to each ear and drastically increases the numbers of loudspeaker in sound systems. Rumsey, the technical chair of the Audio Engineering Society and the director of sound consulting company Logophon, tells Inverse that this represents progress, but not a breakthrough. “In many cases what we would call the timbral quality of sound — that’s the sound of color, and what novices think of as sound quality — has not necessarily increased correspondingly,” he explains. “And that led me to wonder whether there was something rather similar to what has happened in the video animation field.”
The best systems out there right now use surround sound or wave field synthesis systems, which use a large number of loudspeakers to simulate movement and the audio effects of environment. According to Rumsey, “the results are not as convincing as we’d hope them to be.”
Binaural audio and other virtual reality sound reproduction methods have the potential to be very good, “but also potentially very odd and disturbing if they’re not done absolutely perfectly.”
The uncanny valley isn’t a completely mapped-out psychological landscape — some researchers doubt its existence or think that it might disappear with conditioning, but other scientists have proposed an uncanny cliff, in which attempts to go back up the other side to human ultimately fail.
In the 2009 paper “The audio Uncanny Valley: Sound, Fear and the Horror Game,” music professor Mark Grimshaw, then at the University of Bolton in the U.K., proposes that freaky sounds are desirable in certain settings.
When it comes to 3D spatial sound, you could mess with the binaural phase so that “the sound to one ear is pushing where the other one is pulling,” according to Rumsey. Otherwise, intentionally altering voices to make them artificial or odd (the Bane effect) isn’t really a new idea. “People have done that forever,” Rumsey says. He’s worried more about our unintentional flubs, because the auditory equivalent of rubberized Tom Hanks is all the more disturbing when you’re least expecting it.
See the full story here: https://www.inverse.com/article/5365-will-virtual-reality-get-lost-in-the-uncanny-valley-of-sound