YOUR VOICE ISN'T HERE -- IT'S THERE 

In the worlds of virtual reality nothing is what it was. Take your voice. You have been living with your voice all your life. You think you know it. You speak and the sound comes from your larynx.

Almost everyone matches a face with a voice. Sometimes the visuallyimpaired and radio personalities create an imaginary persona. Almost always, the imagined is different from the reality. The change may startle you.

When you speak, the voice you hear may not come from your lips but from the back of the auditorium, from inside the ceiling, the walls, the floor or from inside a drum!

Welcome to the unreal world of acoustical virtual reality. Because of the minimum amount of equipment now necessary to create such cyberspace and the accompanying lower cost of sound equipment, this may be the first VR to hit the marketplace before the totally-encompassing world of full VR comes to Main Street.

As the "Marco Polo of VR" (another writer's words, not mine), I have been travelling to new cyberspace during recent months. Earlier columns described the Parallel Universe in Calgary (where you can play a golf course before it's built), and the Human Interface Technology Lab in Seattle (where you can fly around the Space Needle without leaving the ground or dive into the sea without getting wet), demonstrated these new wonders that will be introducing us all into the 21st century.

A young man named Bo Behring, earlier from Los Angeles, whom I recently visited at his Toronto studio, is the creator of this startling new sound system. "The Focal Point 3D Audio system takes any sound and processes it to generate signals for each ear. It's a cursor for the sound," he explains. "It's the same sound as before, but built into it is new information to make the brain think it's coming from a new direction,".

Just as a computer screen cursor can be moved around, by keying in commands, with a mouse or a voice navigator, Focal Point lets the performer, or whoever is directing the production, move sound around, over, under, in front of, inside, behind or above an audience. You have to experience it to believe it. Then you are hooked. You have entered the first room in the cyberdelic playhouse.

Imagine a sultry singer crooning a seductive ballad. She looks, then points directly at your head. The sound, both to the person selected as well as to the rest of the audience, comes from inside your head! Or a hip-throbbing dancer tosses her body in multiple directions. The sound bounces off the nearest wall in direct line with her hip movements. And, that's just the kindergarten class. Ever since living with the voodooists in Haiti for two years trying to understand some of their "magic", I have been intrigued by their uncanny ability to use sound to make anyone in an audience react in ways beyond their control. The voodooists can actually create an orgasm within a spectator with only the powerful, hypnotic sound from their drums.

One saying from the industrial age is that "Information is Power". Today that belief is widely accepted. Now, it becomes power in a new dimension: the ability to move sound so it appears to emanate from wherever the performer desires. Ventriloquists will be appearing on welfare rolls. For others, who learn how to dance with these acoustical electrons, a much brighter future is about to unfold.

Bo Behring is one of many new Thomas Edison's who will emerge creating worlds that people have never experienced before.

More information:

Bo Gehring, President, Focal Point, 189 Madison Ave., Toronto, Ont. M5R 2S6.

Fax/Phone: 416/963-9188.

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