Today we are going to dream a little. Surely you’ve heard of “8D audios”, those audios that, when you listen to them with headphones, it seems that the sound effects come from different places. There is a well-known one that takes us to a hairdresser and the truth is that the result is fascinating, because it really gives the feeling that we are there listening to how the hairdresser cuts our ends. The question is:what are we waiting for to use this technique in audiobooks?
Usually 8D audios they try to fascinate us by taking us to common places that we all know, like a hairdresser or a room where things happen. But the bottom line is that these 8D audios have enormous, but enormous, potential for tell stories. Imagine how fantastic it would be to listen to the account of the battle of “Helm’s Deep” (‘The Lord of the Rings’, for the clueless) while all around you you hear swords clashing, arrows buzzing and orcs approaching. God, it makes my hair stand on end just thinking about it.
How this not so magical black magic works
First of all, let’s talk a little about what 8D audio is. It is a very bombastic name to refer to holophonic audio and it is quite an old technique. Its origins date back to the 70s and its creation is attributed to Hugo Zuccarelli, an Argentine chemical engineer who sought to understand how the eardrum is capable of locating ambient sound.
My colleague Enrique published an article some time ago explaining everything in depth and I invite you to take a look to understand the more technical part. In this text, and with the aim that it does not extend too much, we are going to look at it above to understand how it works and how this effect is achieved.
Simply put, 8D audio modifies different parameters of the audios to fool our brain. Our brain uses time lag, the variation of the sound pressure level and the variation of frequencies to identify the location of a sound source. If these parameters are modified, the brain bogs and understand that sounds come from different places. In this way, an audio can be modified so that it uses the same parameters that an audio coming from behind would have, and thus the magic arises.
So said it seems simple, something that anyone could do in 10 minutes with Audacity, and well, yes and no. To achieve a realistic effect requires some time and some suitable equipment, but like everything in life, “there is an app for that”. Jaime Altozano, the well-known youtuber specialized in music, has a tutorial on his channel where he explains how to get it with Reaper and a Sennheiser plugin, both free.
From listening to being inside
And now that we know what this technique and its fundamentals are about, it is time to wonder why we have not seen it in audiobooks. Obviously, in a scientific essay we are not going to use it, but we are going to think about it for a second. potential you have in historical novels, horror novels or any novel based on a franchise known as ‘Star Wars’.
I give you a simple example of any suspense book. The protagonist is enclosed in a tiny cell. Next to it is another person who is sobbing and talking locked in another cell. We know that inside the cell there is a pipe, that the captor’s footsteps can be heard when he approaches and, at one point in the scene, our protagonist knocks on the metal door several times.
Imagine, for a moment, that this is told to us by the narrator while listening to these sound effects. The drop that falls from the pipe and hits the ground just below us, the metal door that clicks right ahead when we hit it, the one in the next cell crying and clawing at the wall, the captor taking steps and approaching our door … The story itself already captures us, but with the right and well-timed sound effects, I would go from capturing to submerging, to get inside, to be there and I take off my headphones while I recover from the fear that I would be going through.
More examples, a war novel in which a shooting between two rival sides is described. The typical “bullets whistled overhead as land mines decimated the tank squad advancing to the right” could be quite a spectacle of sounds. The narrator tells us what happens while the sound of the bullets moves very fast from front to back above our head, while we hear a distant explosion from the right and steps behind us from the rest of the soldiers moving through the trench.
Imagine what it would be like to listen to ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ accompanied by the sounds of dragons, arrows and swords; or great classics like ‘1984’ while we listen to the voice of Big Brother; or thematic novels like those of ‘Star Wars’, in which we could hear the lightsabers whizzing in front of us. The possibilities are enormous and, at least to me, it would seem much more interesting to listen to a story than to do it with one voice.
This is something that we have been able to see in some video games. It is not exactly the same, but it goes in these directions. An example would be ‘Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice’, a fabulous story in which we play a Celtic warrior with psychosis. The “Furies”, voices that sound in his head, accompany us throughout history and if we play with headphones we will listen to them left and right, all the time, each one with her tone and her way of speaking, and that makes you immerse yourself much more in the story, in how the protagonist feels and in what it means to have psychosis.
The potential, as I was saying, is enormous, but there is a problem. Audiobooks are usually long and have multiple parts in different settings, so add realistic holophonic audio during the 11:48 hour duration of an audiobook like ‘Red Queen’ it is simply a task proper to be told by Homer. But if we stop to think about it, when the Lumière brothers screened the video of the train arriving at La Ciotat station in 1895 it also seemed impossible to add 5.1 audio to a two and a half hour movie.
Technology evolves a lot, and there we have animated films, realistic CGI and chroma, which allow transport the viewer to unimaginable places from the comfort of your sofa. Who knows? Maybe in the future we will read this text and ask ourselves “but were audiobooks really just flat speech before?”. Set to dream, let’s dream big, right?
This article is part of a weekly section by Jose García dedicated to approaching technology from a more relaxed, personal and informal point of view that we publish in SamaGame every Saturday.
