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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
High Fidelity
The latest digital enhancements in the audio lab are setting a new tone for sound
By ADI IGNATIUS
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Red Dog Studio for TIME.
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I am sitting in a black void in the basement laboratory of Chris Kyriakakis, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Integrated Media Systems Center. The doors are shut, the lights are out, there are no windows. I can hear the silence.
The sound of a Ping-Pong ball suddenly shatters the quiet. I see nothing but can sense the ball moving left, then right, then back again (and again and again). My ears are performing the equivalent of the left-and-right neck pivot required to watch tennis. Finally the ball drops to the ground and rolls. Still in total darkness, I can sense which direction it's moving.
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Virtual surround sound with two speakers 
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This is all a recording, and my basement perch is on the front lines of a project to develop sound for the future. Despite the explosion of audio products in recent years, this is still an era of innovation, with researchers competing for affordable breakthroughs in sharpening and directing audio. The sound barrier, in other words, is still being broken.
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Kyriakakis' Ping-Pong trick is part of a technology he calls "virtual miking." The goal is to create textured, three-dimensional sound through digital mastery. And it offers applications more practical than simulating table tennis in the dark. Like remastering music: a mono or stereo recording can be transformed into multichannel audio approximating concert-hall quality. With stereo the sound seems to come from in front. Virtual miking projects sound from front and back, above and below. Kyriakakis achieves this with a little legwork: visiting concert halls and placing microphones all around. After testing how they pick up sound, he works out algorithms for the venues. With those calculations, he can take existing mono recordings and digitize a live sound, synthesizing the way different microphones—had they actually been in place—would pick up the music.
To show off his work, Kyriakakis plays a recording of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. Then, via digital filtering, he drills down to specific instruments, as if microphones had been placed next to them. A digitized timpani track is stunningly realistic and intimate. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock dropped by recently to play with Kyriakakis' toys. He recorded a tune called Butterfly, in which flute notes dart about—left, right, up, down—like the insect's flight. "Stereo is too confining for my music," Hancock said. "It needs more space."
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