The history of audio has been quite long and a lot of things had been done, but we have taken them for granted or forgot about them. For me, the way two-channel recordings work to reproduce sound stage is simply amazing to me. There is very little science behind it. It is mostly empirical. Chesky records has a couple of CD demonstrating all the techniques of making CD. It starts with microphone placement. The directivity of the microphone can make a difference in the perception of sound stage. In their test CD, they are able to demonstrate in good system, microphone can differentiate height (that is, sound above and below microphone). They demonstrate this using a shaker gradually move from bottom upward, pass the microphone and then towards the top. They also demonstrate we can hear the sound behind the microphone and in front of the microphone. This is amazing with using only 2 microphones. The art of recording is what I would call it. In the same recording, they also demonstrate available technology to create artificial hall reverberations. That is probably what you will be interested. However, in actual recording, a more natural method of picking up reverberations is to place one or two mics at the back seats and mix them with other channels properly. This should compare to the early days of NHK recordings which place a microphone in front of every instrument. We can all imagine what type of sound it reproduced.
In the early days, engineers also experiment using a dummy head and place microphones in the ears. They have a special terminology for it. Later the project failed because our body can vibrate and also feel acoustic energy by passing that via our body. So we don't just hear the air transmission of acoustic energy, we also hear acoustic energy resonate our body and transmit to our ears.
