Inspired by tree ears concept and having it tested in few setups I decided to make a permanent fixture.?
I found myself a roughly head-sized log, bought silicon ears from Ali as well as a connector box with XLR sockets and a front plate.
I set the ears in the log (router is handy for this and even hand-held gives nice, clean results), drilled the log through, filed a flat square at the back and drilled a ca. 20 mm hole in the base to set it up on a tripod.
Electronics as simple as it gets: AOMs 5024 and Simple P48.
Capsules are set in 3 cm long tubes recessed into the head, not mounted directly in the ears.

It's heavy, though not as heavy as KU 100 (3,5 kg!). It looks funny. I like funny. But it works quite nicely. I think.
I embraced unevenness of the log - human heads are not even, regular, symmetric nor perfectly shaped either.

Sample recording from my garden.
Birds, a bit of LF hum (on and off) from neighbour's lawn mower and me, at the end, walking around the mic.

https://on.soundcloud.com/v3Wc9pAuJqq5Lvhx9

开云体育

I love it!?

开云体育

Sounds great! But it's not done until it has a couple of googly eyes (helps with HF dispersion). :-)

Casey - My wonderful, funny wife thought of this even before I finished putting everything together.

So cool! One should start a true binaural forest soundscape project. :-)
Which reminds me to continue my bamboo microphone housings.
Many thanks for sharing!
Heinz

Yup! One's portable binaural tree ?

BTW your (lovely) bamboo housings prompted me to move my lazy ass and finally make this True Tree Ears version.
Beforehand I just fastened home-brewed lavaliers to a log. It worked fine, I made few nice recordings of crickets by placing the log on the ground in the grass. But I wanted ears!

Greets

On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 03:47 PM, pmfalcman wrote:

BTW your (lovely) bamboo housings prompted me

Thanks for your kind feedback! I tried something similar with the Victor HM-200 Binaural Microphone Headphone. But it turned out that the bamboo is much too heavy to carry it around. Anyway, it was fun and I will continue working on the idea. :-D
Btw: The sounds interesting. Especially at the end, when you walked around the True Tree Ears Head.

Heinz - what a splendid setup! :)

Bamboo too heavy?? Seriously? It's empty inside. Or is there something I don't know? Compared to my head it should weight next to nothing :)
Mine's probably around 2 kgs.
Not to mention the 3,5 kgs of Neuman's head...
But, true, ours are not something easy to carry around on long distances.
As one of famous photographers (he worked with large format cameras) said:
"If it's more than 150 m from the car, it is not photogenic".
In our case: "it doesn't sound interesting" ?

Thanks for the kind words.
Near field sounds result obviously in much more interesting spatial effecs.
Once I snuck up on a log-with-lavs setup and reloaded a gun. A metal replica. But it being a real world sound, not Hollywood SFX, it wasn't recognisable when I listened to it few days later. True, nice spatial positioning but just a metallic clicking.

Cheers

On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 08:25 PM, pmfalcman wrote:

Bamboo too heavy?? Seriously? It's empty inside. Or is there something I don't know?

You are right. Many bamboo species are light. It depends on the type of bamboo. This is a so-called Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis). The pole with the headphone is dry, hollowed and about 5 feet in height. The weight is still 5.8 kg. It's like wood, very dense and not so easy to work with. It is best to use tools that are normally used in metalworking. In spring, the shoots grow very quickly. In comparison to wood, Moso bamboo can be harvested after just 4 years. Here's another photo I took.

Ha! This is some interesting stuff! I didn't know bamboo can be so hard it requires metalworking tools.
Great reading, thanks for interesting and extensive information :)

Didn't know your pole measures 5 ft. It definitely is unwieldy to carry around :-D

Thank you for your kind words Eric.

Since Vicki Powys, on Naturerecodists group, pointed out that her head... ummm, no...? that the artificial head she experimented with showed a frequency peak around 4 kHz (same thing reported underwood) I cobbled together a setup to compare in-ear and naked capsules.
Compare, not measure precisely. I've no knowledge nor means for this.
Setup: a mic with open capsule mounted within few cm from in-ear mounted capsule, connected together through my recorder to a computer with AudMe software. This shows me both channels' spectra together in real time.
Sound source: trees in my garden on a moderately windy day as a source of kind of white noise.
I assumed that the distance from the trees, a good umpteen meters, is big enough so the differences in mics mounting are irrelevant.
Also I assumed that any imperfecrions in signal chain are irrelevant as I am comparing only and they'd be the same for both channels. Ergo I can disregard them.

So my dummy head... Hmmm...
The dummy head I made (that's better) has a distinctive peak at ~ 2,5 kHz.?
In-ear mounted capsule shows amplification of incoming sound by up to ~ 10 dB.
The weaker the sound, the larger difference. With strong sound level this difference diminishes to almost none.
The amplification appears only after the 2,5 kHz peak.
Before this peak there's even some attenuation.
The tube is responsible for this peak - checked with pinna removed. Couldn't check how does behave a capsule mounted directly,? without the tube. But I felt there is no forward in this placement hence the tubes.