Spherical Sound

Another of Ken's interests was in "surround sound".  He figured out that just placing speakers around the room does not create a truly realistic experience.

Around this time, there was a lot of interest in surround sound, including Qualraphonic sound.  So there were plenty of people trying to come up with a realistic surround sound experience without headphones.

Ken had learned about binaural sound, and he wanted me to help him create a binaural microphone.  The best binaural microophones of the day used a "dummy head" microphone. Believe it or not, our binaural perception of sound is caused by the shape of your ears and head.  We can sense minute amplitude and phase differences and use them to localize the source of the sound.

Ken bought a dummy head microphone and wanted me to figure out how to duplicate its performance without the dummy  head.

One solution was to use a real head.  Placing tiny microphones in your ear canals worked pretty well but is not entirely practical.

Ken formed a company he called "Pherical Sound" to come up with a solution.

I played with the Dummy Head microphone and made some measurements of what it was doing to see if we could do the same thing electronically.