Turn Your Head and Listen: 360° Audio Between Old Utopias and Market Strategies

Abstract

Many scientific publications directly concern VR, often conceived as a battlefield for rethinking our relationship with the moving image, and our frameworks on topics such as the cinematographic language or the spectator perception. And yet, although for some time film studies have re-evaluated the role of sound in cinematic production and spectatorship, in the field of VR the theoretical reflection on concepts such as stereoscopic audio and binaural recording has remained confined to the technological-engineering aspect. This essay aims to explore the most common audio techniques and their real impact in terms of consumption and affordances, on the basis of some software studies and sound studies reflections and within a media-archaeological perspective. The results of these innovations go beyond the technological features, suggesting a further rethinking of the cinematographic form and calling into question, even from an audio-only perspective, the issue of audience perception and interaction. The case studies taken into account might be an impulse, heuristically, for new studies on these topics.