Not as funny as it may seem. When I worked at Deakin University building up electronic/computing rigs for research academics one Senior Lecturer in Psychology was doing basically that. Dr Simon Oldfield was using a dummy head (not some cheap model used to display hats etc but physical mimic of real human head) and he had put tiny condenser microphone elements inside where the eardrums would be. He would record things in anechoic chamber and play back with a rig that just had two simple speakers above your head. One day he recorded jingling his keys around the dummy head and then played it back to me while I was sitting in the subject chair. You could hear the keys go around your head, even fully behind you. I have never heard such accurate pinpointed 3D sound as good as this in my life and this was some 30 years ago. He went on to do research for Australian Dept of Defence on advanced auditory cockpit displays for fighter planes.