Binaural Recording, Pt 2

After trying the commercial microphones in Part 1 of this series on Binaural Recording, I thought I should try something more home-made – although this also involved a large-ish initial purchase.

What I bought was this handsome life-size mannequin head, intended for work in a hat shop:

The idea, of course, was to install microphones in the ears of the dummy head.  It was made of a fairly hard, but not too brittle, plastic (PVC, I believe it said in the eBay listing), which seemed to be a couple of millimetres thick.

There were several things I particularly liked about this style of head: first of all, the realistic appearance – the whole point of binaural recording is realism, so the closer the recording device resembled the human head, the better.  Unlike some mannequin heads, however, this one wasn’t painted to look like a real person – that would be too spooky! . . .

In particular, the ear was quite well-fashioned:

A big part of the way we hear things is because of the size and shape of our ears, so the accuracy of the ears of the dummy head would have an effect on the quality of the recordings.  For similar reasons, some dummy heads for recording include shoulders, as sound will bounce off these into the ears.

Finally, the underside of the base had a socket which would make it possible for the head to be mounted on a pole or stand, so as to be set at an appropriate sitting or standing height,  whichever was required for a particular recording situation.

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My task in this case was essentially to drill suitable holes in the mannequin’s ears, and insert a pair of electret capsules.  I began by soldering a pair of capsules to the cut ends of the twin phono lead I had left after removing 10cm of one end for the previous project.

The capsules were like these:

The lead with the three connections to the side of the capsule is the Ground lead, the other is the signal.  I connected the two capsules this way, with some shrink tubing to make the joints stronger and stop them short-circuiting.

Turning to the mannequin head, the base was only attached by a dab of glue on one side, so came off easily with a little twisting and a cut with a craft knife.

It was a fairly quick procedure to drill 3 holes in the head: one in each ear, slightly smaller than the size of the electret capsules, and another, larger one at the back for the leads to exit from:

I pushed the lead in through the hole in the back, ran a big blob of hot glue round the front edge of the electret capsules and stuck them just behind the ear holes.  I chose hot glue as it’s easy to remove in case the capsules need replacing at some point in the future; it didn’t matter if a bit of the glue came over the front edge of the capsule as the actual hole on the front which the sound goes in through is very small, just a millimetre or so, right in the middle of the capsule.

Looking inside through the base, you can see how the electret capsules are stuck inside the ear, and the cables are held in place with more hot glue:

This took only a matter of minutes, and the final result looked like this:

As you can see, the microphones are held discreetly in the ear holes, and the twin phono lead, which connects to the preamp, exits from the large hole in the back of the neck, where it’s held in place by further hot glue.

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The cost of this project was £10.50 – about half as much as the first one.  The mannequin head was £9.50; the electret microphone capsules about 25p; and the half phono lead was 75p.

The only other thing to consider is whether the head should be filled – and, if so, what with – to more accurately reflect the fact that human ears are separated by more than air.  The human brain is about three-quarters water and has the consistency of jelly or tofu; it’s quite heavy, but soft and squishy, and you can’t really pick it up until it’s been preserved in some way, which most brains we see pictured have been.

So what the best thing would be to fill the head is difficult to decide, given that jelly or tofu would soon go off.  In one article that I read the dummy head maker installed the microphones then filled the head with liquid silicone, which gradually set solid.  That seemed to be a good plan, although there’d be no way of getting to the microphones again if there were a problem with the capsules or the wiring.  My thinking is it would be sufficient to use something sound deadening, like wool or felt, to ensure that the microphones would only be picking up sound from outside.

[Edit: This is what I did, filling the empty head with a pyjama jacket, which I had been bought but had never worn].

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In the third part of this series, I’ll complete the final project, do some recording and compare the results.

In the meantime, here’s a short extract from the first recording I made with the head: