![]() Broadcasters in other European countries and Canada also showed interest in head-related stereophony, but RIAS and SFB extensively used dummy head microphones between 1973 and the early 1980s. Furthermore, my geographical focus will be on Germany, in particular on the two West-Berlin radio stations RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) and SFB (Radio Free Berlin). Radio drama played a crucial role in dummy head history but today I will focus on music recordings. I will further show that the way sound professionals “audiopositioned” ordinary radio listeners was in contradiction with the listeners own experience and demands. Examining the “auditory perspective” of recordists and sound technicians, I will argue that the failure of dummy head microphones was less grounded in technical problems but in recording practices, listening modes and aesthetic concepts of the time. In the following, I will briefly describe the “audio-technical discourse” that accompanied the introduction of head-related stereophony. The following ten years were full of high hopes and many disappointments and by the mid-1980s dummy head microphones were regarded as a largely failed technology. Sound professionals were much less enthusiastic: they admitted the spatial quality of the recordings, but because of some technical shortcomings of the KU80, most sound recordists rejected binaural sound recording. Journalists praised head-related stereophony as “super stereo” and radio listeners wrote enthusiastic letters asking for more binaural broadcasts. Trade fair visitors could listen to test recordings at the stand of the joint organization of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters (ARD), and the Berlin radio station RIAS broadcasted the first binaural radio drama: “Demolition”. The following year, the general public was introduced to head-related stereophony during the International Broadcasting Fair (IFA) in Berlin. In late 1972, the Berlin based microphone company Neumann, shipped first KU80 models to customers in Germany, Austria and Belgium. However, because of technically limited recording equipment and insufficient understanding of human spatial hearing, it took more than 30 years before dummy head microphones got ready for the market with the KU80 dummy head. Head-related stereophony, or binaural sound reproduction, enabled the listener to experience the spaciousness and presence of the original recording situation, thus it seemed to fulfill the listeners’ desire for “concert hall realism”. During the 1930s, first dummy head experiments were conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.Bell engineers Steinberg and Snow summarized that dummy head sound transmission aims “to reproduce in a distant listener’s ears, by means of, exact copies of the sound vibrations that would exist in his ears if he were listening directly”. ![]() The design of a dummy head, or Kunstkopf, microphone is rather simple: it replicates an average sized human head that is equipped with pinnae and ear canals in which small microphones are placed, one in each ear. I would like to thank my fellow panelists, Susan Schmidt Horning, Melissa Van Drie and Krin Gabbard, as well as the session chair, Hans-Joachim Braun, and the audience for helpful comments and questions. ![]() This is an unabridged version of a (shorter) presentation I gave at last month’s ICOHTEC meeting in Porto (see session T1E in the conference programme). ![]()
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