Put on a pair of headphones, press play on a good binaural recording, and something odd happens. A door seems to close behind you. Someone whispers just past your left shoulder. Rain lands above your head instead of somewhere between your ears.
That is the promise of binaural microphones. They do not try to capture a sound as neutrally as possible. They try to capture it the way a person standing in that exact spot would have heard it.
For artists working with sound, place and memory, that difference matters. This guide explains how binaural recording works, where it came from, which microphones people actually use, and how to get recordings that hold up.
What makes a recording binaural
Ordinary stereo uses two microphones arranged to create a pleasing spread between two loudspeakers. Binaural recording places two microphones where the eardrums would be, usually inside the ears of a model head or in the ears of the recordist.
The head is the important part. Your skull, your shoulders and the folds of your outer ear change every sound before it reaches the eardrum, and your brain reads those changes as direction.
A sound coming from the right reaches the right ear a fraction of a millisecond earlier than the left. It also arrives a little louder, because the head casts an acoustic shadow. The ridges of the outer ear add tiny changes in tone that help you tell front from back and up from down.
A binaural microphone records all of these cues together. When the two channels are played back over headphones, one to each ear, the brain does what it always does and rebuilds the space around you.
Why headphones are part of the work
Binaural recordings are made for headphones. On loudspeakers each ear hears both speakers, the carefully recorded differences between left and right get mixed together, and much of the three-dimensional effect falls away.
This is worth deciding early. If a piece is meant for a gallery with speakers, a binaural recording may sound pleasant but rather ordinary. If the listener will wear headphones, on a walk, in a listening booth or at home, binaural can feel startlingly close.
From the Paris Opéra to the dummy head
The idea is older than most people expect. At the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, Clément Ader placed pairs of telephone transmitters along the front of the stage at the Paris Opéra. Visitors at the exhibition held a receiver to each ear and heard the performance with a sense of position on the stage.
The modern binaural microphone arrived with the dummy head. Neumann presented the KU 80 at the 1973 radio and television exhibition in Berlin, developed with researchers at the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. It was a moulded human head with a studio microphone capsule inside each ear canal.
German radio stations used it for radio drama, and a good number of plays were broadcast in dummy-head stereo through the 1980s. Neumann followed with the KU 81 and then the KU 100 in 1992, which is still made today and has become a reference model for binaural work.
The main types of binaural microphones
Binaural microphones come in three broad families, and each one suits a different way of working.
Dummy heads. A full artificial head, like the Neumann KU 100, gives the most consistent and repeatable results. It sits on a stand, does not breathe or fidget, and can be left in a forest or a concert hall for hours. It is also expensive, heavy and conspicuous.
Ears without a head. The 3Dio Free Space range mounts two silicone ears on a block, with a capsule inside each. The Free Space Pro II uses matched DPA 4060 CORE+ capsules and offers two XLR outputs with phantom power, plus a 3.5 mm output powered by an internal 9 V battery. It is more portable than a full head and popular with ASMR creators and field recordists.
In-ear microphones. Small capsules sit in your own ears, so your own head does the shaping. The Roland CS-10EM is a common starting point: two electret condenser microphones built into earphones, powered by the recorder's plug-in power at 2 to 10 volts, so you can monitor while you record.
In-ear microphones are discreet and cheap, and they capture your own body in the space, which can be exactly what a walking piece needs. The trade-off is that every turn of your head, every swallow and every rustle of a collar ends up in the recording.
What artists use binaural sound for
The best-known artistic use is the audio walk. Janet Cardiff's walks guide a listener through a real place with headphones, layering recorded footsteps, voices and street sound over the street the listener is actually standing in.
Her piece The Missing Voice (Case Study B), commissioned by Artangel in 1999, begins at the former Whitechapel Library in London and leads listeners through Spitalfields toward Liverpool Street Station. Her Long Black Hair, made for the Public Art Fund in 2004, follows a similar idea through the paths of Central Park in New York.
What makes these walks unsettling is the overlap. The recorded world sounds so spatially real that listeners struggle to tell which footsteps are on the soundtrack and which are on the pavement around them.
Binaural recording also turns up in radio drama, documentary sound, site-specific installation, theatre, virtual reality and ASMR. For artistic research, it offers a way to document not only what a place sounds like but how it feels to stand in it, which is often closer to the experience a project is trying to describe.
Choosing equipment for your first binaural recordings
Start with how you will move. If you plan to walk and record, in-ear microphones are the lightest option, and they ask for little more than a recorder with a plug-in-powered stereo mic input.
If you want to leave a microphone in one place, or record the same scene at different times of day, a fixed head or ear rig gives steadier results. You will need a recorder with two XLR inputs and phantom power for models like the Free Space Pro II.
Check the recorder before anything else. Many small handheld recorders can power electret in-ear microphones, while XLR models need full phantom power on both channels. Our comparison of the Zoom F3 field recorder and its rivals covers the inputs and powering options on several popular recorders.
Recording technique that makes a difference
Hold still, or move on purpose. With in-ear microphones, small head movements swing the whole sound field around the listener, which can feel disorienting. Slow, deliberate turns read as natural; constant twitching does not.
Watch for your own body. Breathing, swallowing, chewing gum and clothing against the cables are all recorded close up and very loud. Short, loose collars and a light scarf over the cables help.
Protect against wind. Exposed microphones, especially in-ear ones, pick up wind noise quickly. Small furry windscreens made for lavalier microphones work on many in-ear models, and a sheltered position does even more.
Set levels with care. Sounds very close to the ears, like a hand clap or a passing voice, can be far louder than the background. Leave headroom, or use a 32-bit float recorder if you have one.
Listen on headphones as you work. Monitoring tells you immediately whether a sound sits in front of you, behind you or seems to come from inside your head, which is a common problem when sources are directly ahead.
Where binaural fits in a wider practice
Binaural recording is one tool among many. It is less flexible in editing than ordinary stereo or ambisonics, because the spatial image is fixed into the two channels and cannot easily be rotated or remixed for speakers later.
It shines when the work is about a single listener in a specific spot. For broader approaches to capturing place, our guide to field recording and how artists capture the sound of a place covers microphones, recorders and wind protection more generally.
And because binaural work depends so much on attention, it pairs well with listening practices. Pauline Oliveros's ideas, explored in our piece on deep listening and the practice of paying attention to sound, are a useful companion before you ever press record.
Before you press record
Binaural microphones are simple in principle: two ears, two capsules and a head, real or artificial, between them. The craft lies in where you stand, how still you are and who will be listening.
Decide early that your audience will wear headphones, choose a rig that matches how you move, and practise in a quiet room before taking it outside. The first time a recorded footstep makes you turn around, you will understand why artists keep coming back to it.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.