Why so few?
Despite all the advantages, binaural audio is used relatively rarely.
Why? The main difficulty is technological. To record binaural audio, you need special equipment. This is a long, complex and expensive process.
At the same time, the effect can very easily be lost if the player, for example, ignores the call to put on headphones at the beginning of the game. Or, moreover, I’m not used to playing with headphones at all. The widespread use of headphones while gaming has only recently ceased to be primarily a subcultural phenomenon.
It’s the same in advertising, only the entry threshold is even lower - it’s unlikely that anyone will specifically put on headphones to listen to a minute-long advertisement. This technique will not work at all in television advertising.
In other words, binaural audio was destined to remain an interesting, beautiful, but still oddity in the gaming industry, and not a common technique. But then VR technologies appeared. Which are also individualistic, difficult to produce and consume, but offer a previously impossible immersion effect. Most likely, in the near future we will hear more often about the combination of VR and binaural audio. For example, the Oculus Crescent Bay prototype already uses binaural technology.
But now the important feature of binaural audio is that it works great in the simplest headphones. To fully experience the immersion in sound illusion, you do not need to buy the most powerful and expensive equipment, because the main requirement is channel separation.
Binaural effect
Binaural sound in games is essentially the use of human hearing to create a surround sound effect.
This is not so much a technological solution, like stereo sound, but a physiological one - our perception of binaural sound is explained by neurophysiology. We hear with two ears at the same time. The binaural effect occurs when the right ear is closer to the sound source when turning the head to the left of the source or vice versa. Sound reaches one ear earlier than the other - the phases of sound vibrations shift relative to each other. It is this phase shift that allows the brain (of humans and many mammals) to determine the position of the sound source in space: the distance to it and the horizontal direction to the source.
Binaural audio is recorded using special microphones. Two sound recording devices are inserted into a mannequin replica of a human head (ideally, of course, this replica should completely correspond to the head of the future listener, including identical ears and the distance between the ears). Such sound recording not only creates the illusion of surround sound, but also copies the ways of perceiving sound - the very features of understanding distance, direction and reflection.
In binaural audio, the distance between the ears and the effect of sound reflection from the ears are important. Therefore, this sound is best perceived through headphones. Of course, you can also hear it with the help of speakers, but the effect will be weaker: the sound source is further from the ear, at different distances from the ears and can be directed in different directions. With headphones, the sound from the left and right audio channels will directly enter the left and right ears - this is the most important thing for the full perception of this audio illusion.
Advertising and cinema
Binaural audio has such a powerful effect on the listener that the visual image is secondary.
The next step is to get rid of the picture and rely only on the sound. This was done, for example, in advertising (one of the videos of the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team). The game Papa Sangre for iOS is made using a similar principle. The game world is hidden in the dark, and the player has to focus on the voice of the narrator, follow the sound and literally “see with his ears.”
The effect is actively used for meditation and relaxation - in corresponding videos, audio tracks and applications.
In 2013, the film The Blind Passanger was released in Australia. A performance by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra was specially recorded for him using a binaural microphone.
Hearing is better than seeing
Very often, games have main “hooks” - somewhere the graphics are especially good, somewhere there are revolutionary mechanics, sometimes we play for the sake of the plot, sometimes for the sake of the characters.
But it's rare, very rare, that something is worth playing just for the sound. There are games with a good soundtrack - for example, all the music heard in Life is Strange and its sequel Before the Storm makes you want to, if not put it in a playlist, then at least listen to it to the end. In one of the first scenes of Life is Strange, the heroine is uncomfortable at school, she puts on her headphones and walks down the corridor. The central theme of the game plays, it absorbs (almost completely, but still not completely) the roar of school recess - like the heroine, we do not want to leave this musical trance, return to reality (although for us this, of course, is not reality).
However, the main "feature" of Life Is Strange is the gameplay and its close connection with the player's participation in the plot. Music is an important, but still secondary detail.
There are, however, games that may not stand out in terms of gameplay or graphics, but are memorable solely for what happens in the headphones.
One of the most recent and most significant examples of this kind is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. The main feature of Hellblade is binaural sound. What it is?
