Immersive Audio: A step forward towards a moldable reality

What does reality consist of? Details! We perceive so many of them all the time, that we would not be able to make a complete list of all those around us. Our attention is wired to recognize just a quite limited number of the entire spectrum coming to us through our senses. For this reason, when, for example, we revisit a place that we already know, or watch a movie again, or eat again a wonderful dish that we have recently discovered, it is always a different experience.

Do an exercise: close your eyes, and, for five minutes, listen carefully to everything that sounds around you. Make a list of at least twenty sounds (you will be surprised).

Well, one of the obsessions of technology nowadays has to do with the construction of artificial realities. Virtual reality, for instance, as well as all the experiences that can be lived through it, such as video games, series, concerts, or virtual classes (among thousands of possibilities.) Of course, the sound is an essential element of reality. In fact, we can close our eyes so as not to see what we have in front of us, but we hardly stop listening to what is coming to our ears.

This is where some trends, like Immersive Audio, get inside the game. As its name indicates, this trend is about producing an experience at a brain level, an immersive experience, as if you were immersed in a diving tank, in the middle of everything, floating there, without touching any of the six walls of the cube where you are. A countless number of sounds reach your brain, in different intensities and frequencies, engulfing it to the point that it does not differentiate between the artificiality of all that and the reality to which it is used. Immersive audio seeks to describe technological and audiovisual processes associated with representing sound events in three dimensions and thus being able to offer the listener a better sound experience. Audio does not traditionally come from two basic directions (as with stereo speakers and headphones,) but also from above, below, and behind. Some methods of 3D playback allow sound to be played from an infinite number of directions so that the listener is surrounded by a true sound sphere.

Read also: Sound & Audio Industry Trends: AI, Machine Learning and DNN

One of the most interesting aspects of this trend is that there is no need for a highly-sophisticated infrastructure. In fact, all you need is a binaural sound system, and the advances in this field have been phenomenal. Consider, for example, this list of 10 Home Immersive Sound Systems. Immersive audio can even be played on regular headphones as well, and these don't have to be the most expensive ones you find on the market. The principle is, actually, quite basic: to produce psychoacoustic phenomena to hack the brain's perception. The brain will think that everything comes from all directions, as in a three-dimensional sphere, despite everything really comes from two sources, one on the left and one on the right.

The latest advances in the field of Soundbars are also outstanding. If someone, for whatever reason, doesn't want to wear headphones to watch their favorite series before bed, they can use a series of Soundbars located on the walls and ceiling, which will make the audio-visual experience so interesting. In the future, these Soundbars will be increasingly easy to acquire, and technology will not stop their advance. Everything points towards minimalism in terms of space, and the installation of Soundbars could be much easier every day.

Now, when it comes to sound production, things are also moving forward. One of the most interesting changes brought about by this trend is the way immersive sound design is carried out. Instead of focusing on individual channels, as it has been done for some time now, when mixing, each sound is shown as an individual object in a three-dimensional panorama. The sound design, in this case, consists of making mixtures of objects, similar to developing the composition of an image: moving the elements from one place to another until you get the image you need. This is quite revolutionary, in the sense that sound is designed from a plastic point of view, rather than an abstract one. This brings several advantages. For example, the soundtrack of a movie or a series does not have to be re-mixed every time. The engineer simply creates the mix only once in his or her studio, and this material can then be rendered on any playback system, using the algorithm.

Similarly, when we talk about object-based mixing, we can even remove some uncomfortable sounds, as we do in a video game on the setup when we don't want to hear some things. This does not only mean falsifying reality but also offering it customized to the client.

In an immersive virtual reality, the sound will be a fundamental key. Are we ad portas of a matrix?

*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com