I signed up just so I could post this, heh
Proprietary algorithms, mysterious equipment, interference patterns - all this speculation about this mysterious and wonderous discovery Zuccarelli made and kept a secret.
The man had no scientific credentials, and I doubt there was any real science behind it. The idea that your head or ears "broadcasts" some kind of carrier wave, for one, is proposterous.
In my honest opinion, he most likely made a big deal of a very simple discovery that's just obvious enough that most people would simply overlook it: Bigger ears.
Many smaller wild animals, such as rabbits, which are easy prey, have bigger, more cup-shaped ears, which enhances their ability to hear details and locate a sound source in space.
To experience this effect, simply cup your hands over your ears and listen - holophonics!
Repeat the barbershop experiment if you need to convince yourself of this - have someone shake a box of matches while moving it around your head, and try the difference while you cup your ears.
I'm betting the only thing Zuccarelli discovered, was that animals with bigger ears have better hearing - as far as making recordings, he must have used a "head" like many others have attempted, but it most like just had bigger "ears", and that's all the "magic" there was to this. That's probably why he didn't want anybody to see it, because it's not exactly a "proprietary" discovery or a technology you can protect by any other means than simply hiding it and hoping nobody else discovers the same thing.
Here's a crappy illustration I made:
http://i.imgur.com/ZqXiyO3.png
The left ear is cupped, the right ear is not.
Sound waves hitting the left ear are going to disperse, reverberate and filter in radically different ways, from every angle, over at least a 180 degree range. With both ears cupped, you have a full 360 degrees of enhanced variation of soundwaves from different angles.
Compare to the right ear, where the sound is only somewhat dispersed by the much smaller surface of the normal human ear, and perhaps the skull, jaw and neck, but these are likely much smaller factors and the shape of the ear which directly affects the sound, and, most importantly, affects it differently from different angles.
I'm betting the reason why this still "works", as far as enhancing our spatial perception, is that, although humans are not equipped with large ears, some ancestor species probably were, and we simply retained the ability to perceive with "big ears", which were easy enough for Neanderthals to "turn on and off" by simply cupping their hands when they were hunting or being hunted.
If any of you have field recording equipment or possibly a "head", this theory shouldn't be that difficult to test. Just add bigger ears.
Thoughts?
