Sound Particles 3D Prints Every Employee's Ears to Perfect Spatial Audio

3D Scanning Meets Spatial Audio

Sound Particles, a 17-person audio software company based in Lisbon, has taken an unconventional approach to perfecting spatial audio: they've 3D printed replicas of every employee's ears, head, and torso.

The company, founded in 2016, uses the printed models for granular acoustic testing based on the premise that each person's unique anatomy shapes how sound reaches the brain.

From Hollywood to Consumer Headphones

Sound Particles' core technology borrows from computer graphics—treating individual sounds as particles in a 3D environment, letting creators place sounds in virtual space, assign position and movement, and capture the result through virtual microphones.

This approach underpins soundscapes in major film productions including Dune and Oppenheimer. A small number of base samples can be adjusted into thousands of distinct variations, making dense scenes feel more natural while reducing manual editing workload.

The Personalized Audio Bet

The ear-printing program feeds directly into Sound Particles' biggest product bet: personalized binaural audio technology.

Most immersive audio today depends on multi-speaker theater setups. Sound Particles has spent years building technology that uses a listener's head and ear geometry to simulate how sound moves and interacts with the body. The goal is convincing 3D audio through regular headphones—no speaker array required.

Beyond Hollywood

The company's product lineup includes plugins for digital audio workstations, immersive synthesizers, and a 3D sound library. They're also applying their spatial audio engine to AI development, generating audio datasets with precise spatial labels and realistic environmental noise to train neural networks for speech recognition and smart vehicle environment detection.

Sound Particles started with a fundamental question about how sound should exist in 3D space—and has followed that question from Hollywood film production to consumer headphones to AI training data.