Holophonic™ Sound

Hugo Zuccarelli is the inventor of an interesting sound system that allows a stereo system to recreate the sonic environment so accurately, you can hear the location of each sound as if you were there. He figured out that the ears holographically process incoming sounds to make the location of the source detectable.

The common theory of how we locate a sound source at this point is based on issues of time delay and sound volume. A sound coming from one side, say the left, will reach the left ear slightly before the right ear, and the sound will be louder in the left ear.

Hugo Zuccarelli, inventor of the Holophonic™ Sound System

Hugo points out that this simply is not the way we detect location. Put your hand or a ear protector over just one ear, close your eyes, and you will notice that you can still identify the location of sounds.

The best way to start to understand the technique it is to compare it to a photographic hologram with multiple exposures. These are the holograms where, when you move just slightly, and a completely different picture appears.

The hologram stores phase information of the light into the photographic plate. When you view the hologram with a coherent (all the light waves are in phase with one-another) light source, the phase information stored in the hologram is recreated, allowing you to see the three dimensional image.

Holographic images are created by taking the same coherent light source (normally a laser) and splitting the beam into the "object" and "reference" beams. The object beam reflects off of the subject, and reflects toward the photographic film. The reference beam also shines on the film. The two light beams interact with one another to create an interference pattern on the film.

Later, when you shine a coherent light onto the developed film, the illumination interacts with the "recorded" interference pattern, in this case, making the image appear.

Hugo figured out that the ear works in the same way, only it creates its own reference sound, or oto-acoustic emission, and somehow, it is able to determine the location of a sound by resulting interference pattern that is created in the ear.

At this point, we do not understand about oto-acoustic emission, whether the ear puts out a single tone, like in tinnitus, or if the sound is more of a white noise with lots of frequencies.

Regardless, Hugo is onto something with his Holophonic™ system.

Holophonic™ is trademark of Hugo Zuccarelli.