Get Your Virtual Haircut and Other Auditory Illusions

Put On Your HEADPHONES!!!

Not speakers, not laptop speakers, not your phone held up to your ear. Headphones. This entire post is useless without them, and absolutely magical with them. I promise, it’s worth it going to get them!

When you’re ready, start with the first track, the famous Virtual Barbershop. Close your eyes, hit play, and a barber will walk around your head, snipping behind your left ear, then your right, then buzzing the clippers up the back of your neck. Your brain will insist someone is physically in the room with you. It’s the same trick every time and it never stops working. Then work through the rest: a fly that circles your head until you swat at nothing, a train that passes through your living room, a whisper that will make you check over your shoulder.

The Player

How the Trick Works

These are binaural recordings: audio captured with two microphones placed inside the ears of a dummy head, so each mic hears exactly what your ears would hear, including the tiny timing and volume differences between them and the way your outer ear filters sound arriving from behind versus in front. Your brain uses those exact cues, called the head-related transfer function, to place sounds in three-dimensional space. Play the recording back through headphones, delivering each ear its own channel with nothing bleeding across, and your brain reconstructs the entire room. The barber isn’t panning left to right like a cheap stereo effect. He’s walking around you.

That’s also why speakers kill it: both ears hear both channels, the cues smear together, and the magic collapses into ordinary stereo. Headphones or nothing.

Nearly two decades after this post first ran, the same principle now powers the spatial audio in your AirPods and every VR headset on the market. The barbershop was just twenty years early. Enjoy…