3d sound, virtual surround, ambisonics, fake bineural sounds

[morganwk]

Hello. I make music and I recently discovered amazing surround sound demos that only need headphones. (look up the "virtual barber shop")
I want to make this kind of thing for my music, but it is all digital. There are no mics involved, so I can't use the dummy head technique, and If I wanted to do it by "worlding", I don't have money to buy microphones.

So let's say I have a bass track, a drum track, and a treble track. I want the treble to sound in front of the listener, the drums normal, and the bass behind. Is there a plugin for audacity that can take a mono or stereo track and move it around the listener with something like ambisonics or some other kind of virtual surround?
If there isn't, how can I go about doing this with something else?
Oh, and I have no money to spend on this project.

[steve]

The beauty of binaural recording is the realism that the technique produces (assuming that the recording equipment is of sufficiently high quality).
Position of sounds can be faked using a variety of techniques.
Simple panning (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Mixing#gain ) is an easy way to adjust the apparent left/right position.
Adding reverb to a sound (for example with GVerb) can make the sound more distant.
The subject is quite a complex one, but there is a reasonable introduction on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_audio_effect

There's a free VST plug-in called "Binaural spatialize" available here: http://tinyurl.com/c734wb3
I've not tried it so I don't know if it works with Audacity, but I thought it might be of interest.

[morganwk]

Thank you very much for the fast reply! I will check this out. I will update if it works.