Recently, I think a lot about how to use the new technology to allow the users to immerse themselves inside the music. We are so used to listening to music in “flat” stereo that the opportunities of 6DoF tracking are very tempting to be explored in the music context. In one of my previous posts,…
The aesthetics of sound design for spatial audio are still in development. Lately, I was looking for examples of VR pieces which show excellent use of 3D audio with great sound design which enhances storytelling. Here are the ones I have gathered so far: DISPATCH by Here Be Dragons Spheres by Eliza McNitt Notes On…
3D audio is necessary to create presence in any VR experience. But when to use it? According to Walter Murch – the father of sound design – people cannot distinguish between more than 3 auditory events at the same time (of a similar auditory characteristic). We can assume then, that there is a limit to…
Immersive audio is necessary for any convincing XR experience. However, many times it is not clear how to create a natural audio layer when trying to go beyond traditional headphones and stereo speaker systems. Today I would like to introduce an object-based approach to sound mixing which can simplify this process. Spatial audio allows positioning…
Music is a very powerful tool when it comes to any kind of storytelling, including VR. It can radically change the meaning of a scene, give us information about the plot, point our attention to something, and make us laugh or cry. All of this without words. Moreover, the message is so clear that people…
Recently, I am working a lot on my dissertation topic, trying to narrow down my ideas and define the focus of the research. One thing I know for sure – I will focus on audio perception in Augmented Reality systems. But before I can start any experiments, I have to find the tools which will…
Over the last two years working with the Immersive Audio Group at NYU, I engineered more than 20 music recording sessions in VR. We captured audio and video in 360 which means that the viewer could later rotate the head in VR to see and listen in 3D. Our main goal was to find the…
The biggest shock I experienced when moving to New York was that there was no place without noise. Sirens, cars, and loud music on the street by my apartment, traffic and construction on the way to work, squeaking subway trains and loud music in the stations, the loud background noise of the air conditioner in…
Last week I participated in the evaluation of an omnidirectional speaker built by Parichat Songmuang – a master’s student in Music Technology. Listening to a recording of a cello through the speaker gave me the illusion that the musician was with me in the room. The experience was so realistic and inspiring that it made…
If you have ever heard about 3D audio, for sure you also heard the term HRTF. HRTF stands for Head Related Transfer Function – you can think of it as a fingerprint of our spatial hearing. It’s unique for everyone because each of us has a unique shape of the ears. To explain why this…