Capturing blocked-entrance binaural signals from open-entrance recordings

Binaural recordings enable us to capture all sound attributes including spatial information, room effect, and source characteristics in a given environment. It has been shown that blocked-entrance binaural recordings provide advantages over open-entrance recordings, primarily because the blocked-entrance recordings is not influenced by the ear canal acoustics of the individual for which it is recorded. However, blocking the ear canal for recoding imposes an obvious disruption to normal hearing conditions, which may be unacceptable for applications in which binaural audio capturing is desired but without interfering the individual's hearing and doing. In this work we propose a strategy for the recording of binaural audio with minimal hearing interference, and for transforming these recordings to blocked-entrance versions that are more suitable for analysis and reproduction of binaural audio in a more general context. To this purpose, equalization filters are derived from the ratio between blocked and open ear canal transfer functions. Different transfer-function measuring techniques and inverse filtering methods are evaluated.