spatial audio

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

Techmoan demonstrates the Tefifon, a vintage German audio player that combines elements of record and tape with a grooved elastic loop. He shows how it works and plays it.

Smarter Every Day shares a binaural audio recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch made by Trevor Mahlmann, with explanations of the sounds including the sonic booms of the landing boosters. It is meant to be heard with headphones.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

A Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% with the PaulStretch program, turning a pop track into a long ambient drone.

The official audio of Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows' from the album I'm Your Man.

A 12-minute film in which Erlang's creators demonstrate the language's fault tolerance and live-system features, including phoning each other to show it working. This version has fixed audio.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

Guitarist Jim Lill spends a year testing where guitar amplifier tone comes from, swapping tubes, rectifiers and bias types. He finds that much of it can be reproduced with EQ and distortion in different orders.

A ShortCircuit (Linus Tech Tips) review of Nvidia's RTX Voice, which uses GPU-based neural networks to remove background noise from microphone audio. It demonstrates how well the filtering works.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

Dave2D looks at why MacBook speakers sound so much better than those on other laptops, with input from an audio researcher. He compares them against the best Windows laptop speakers.

A five-minute demonstration of the Shepard tone, an audio illusion made from octave-separated tones that makes pitch seem to rise endlessly without ever getting higher.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

Real air traffic control audio of the Air Astana flight whose flight controls had been wired in reverse by a maintenance error. The pilots struggle to keep control while ATC tries to help.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

Footage from a camera on a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster from liftoff through descent, with audio enhanced by Skywalker Sound from the original camera microphones. The sound is real, not foley.

A short comparison of the retail release of Metallica's Death Magnetic against the Guitar Hero 3 version of the same song. It switches between the two so you can hear and see the heavy clipping in the retail master.

The music video for Aphex Twin's T69 Collapse, directed by Weirdcore, with heavy strobing and glitchy audiovisual imagery. It is a track from the Collapse EP.

Tom Scott explains Electrical Network Frequency analysis, where hum from the power grid in a recording is matched against grid logs to date and place it. He talks to a researcher and sets them a challenge.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

A clean-audio clip from Apple's 1997 WWDC where Steve Jobs answers a hostile question from a developer about OpenDoc. He argues you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

Audio clips of the intro and technology quotes from the 1999 strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, in male and female voices, covering techs 0 through 24.

A short smartphone-recorded clip from a 2014 event in Paris where DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis presents an AI learning to play old Atari games. The system learns from only the video signal and the score. Audio quality is poor.

A segment from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos explaining the fourth spatial dimension through analogy with a two-dimensional world and shadow projection.

8088 MPH is a demoscene production for the original 1981 IBM PC with CGA graphics and a 4.77MHz 8088, shown with real composite output. It competed at Revision 2015 and pushes the hardware well past what it was thought capable of, breaking emulators.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.

Bret Copeland, in an astronaut costume, gives an energetic talk on how the Space Shuttle landed from orbit, including reentry and the unpowered glide. It includes real-time landing footage with HUD and audio.

A capture of Second Reality, the real-time audiovisual demo by Future Crew first shown at Assembly 1993, recorded from a 486DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound. It showcases the peak of early 1990s PC demoscene techniques.

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.

A restored recording of Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh in 1984, including the moment it is taken out of its bag and speaks. The upload comes from the team that rediscovered and restored the lost footage.

A full piano performance of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14, the Moonlight Sonata, with all three movements: Adagio sostenuto, Allegretto and Presto agitato.