Kunstkopf binaural microphone9/12/2023 In close cooperation with Peter Damaske, he built a system to reproduce head-related stereophony with two loudspeakers. However, favorable for the reproduction of binaural recordings was the stereo reproduction system, Mellert constructed in his diploma project. The probe microphones had an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio compared to studio microphones as their initial aim was to find cross-correlations of ear signals to better understand human spatial hearing and not to produce high-fidelity recordings. Damaske, Wagener and Mellert realized that these recordings were “very impressive and lively” although their dummy head was not built for music recordings. of a jazz concert and a choir of 120 singers. In 1970, an improved version of the dummy head was also used for binaural recordings (Damaske 1971): e.g. At the bottom you can see the probe microphones. Still, the experiments showed that a dummy head could be used for such localization tests (Damaske/Wagener 1969).ĭummy head of Damaske and Wagener the light grey spot is the carved out pinna. The result was that test persons had greater difficulties to judge the sound direction (in particular, from the direction “back”) through the dummy head’s ears. Test persons had to judge directions and results of the two test series were compared. In an anechoic chamber, seven test persons listened, first with their own ears, and then through the ears of the dummy head to a human speaker reading continuous text from eleven different directions. Damaske and Wagener used their dummy head for localization experiments in the median plane. For measurements they inserted two curved probe-tubes and coupled them with Sennheiser MD 321 probe microphones (see pictures below). They approximated progressively the dummy head’s ear signals to measurements of human ear signals they obtained from the literature. Because the mannequin’s ears had no proper pinnae, Damaske and Wagener had to carve them out themselves (in the picture below you can see the white carved out part of the mannequin’s ears). For this purpose, they acquired a mannequin’s head from a nearby department store. Instead of using probe microphones to measure ear signals of human test subjects, Damaske and Wagener decided to use a dummy head. The initial observation was that for sound directions “front” and “back” human spatial hearing could not get directional cues from time and sound pressure differences their assumption was that human hearing uses direction specific sound variations to discriminate “front” and “back”. Roughly at the same time, as Mellert started his diploma project, two of his senior colleagues, Peter Damaske and Bernhard Wagener, studied cross-correlations of ear signals. Following this practicum, Mellert received the offer to write his diploma thesis about stereo reproduction systems – we’ll come back to this later. Mellert studied physics in Göttingen with no special interest in acoustics, but he particularly enjoyed the practical training the III. Physical Institute, under the direction of Erwin Meyer, was specialized in studying all kinds of wave phenomena from microwaves to concert hall acoustics. Physical Institute at the University of Göttingen. Mellert started his dummy head research around 1968 at the III. During our oral-history interview, he told me about the three dummy head projects he had been involved. As mentioned in my last post, I recently visited Volker Mellert in Oldenburg.
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