Sounds Like 2016: Audio Set to be Big, Says Taylor

What has happened in sound and what will the sound landscape in 2016 and onwards be like?

The New Year often kicks off with a look back. Now, take a journey through last year’s most vivid memories, those moments that caused joy, pain, butterflies, or even fear. Sound will have played an integral part in these snatched instants: from the throb of a favourite tune to clashes of thunder, birds tweeting to the banging and hammering of construction work outside your bedroom.

However, over the past few years, it is the moving picture that has dominated people’s attention, as massive leaps forward in technology - like CGI, motion-control and digital film - have given storytellers new opportunities to explore what only a year or so ago would not have been possible.

The power of the new visual trick has always - understandably - grabbed the limelight, and the bad news for post production sound recording in all of this is that, more often than not, this puts our part of the process firmly in the background.

As blue screens, green screens, motion-capture et al have marched on in the world of pictures, the demand for sound has gone from stereo to 5.1, 7.1, IMAX 12.1, and now Dolby Atmos, with many other multi-channel spatial audio systems starting to set up base camps.

Where’s this all going? Well I’m not sure that it is necessarily a healthy direction but the Holy Grail is in delivering total immersion for the audience. They will no longer just be viewers - instead they will be right inside the visual world, believing that, as they move and interact in the virtual space, it is a real environment.

Sound has to fit and meld with the visual, which suggests that the world for audio is going to be dominated by systems that can deliver the sound correctly in context (mixed) and spatially located (panned) in 3D - and all in harmony with the storytellers’ stories.

This is starting to happen in the VR and gaming worlds. The world of sound is changing and the foundations are being laid at this moment - something I predict will get even stronger in 2016.

For doubters of this future landscape, just Google the words: virtual reality headset. I got 14.5 million hits. That is a rising new movment. It is driven by the astounding power and low cost of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). If you take the year 2000 as the starting point for audio focussed DSP technology, then using Moore’s Law, the DSP processing power has increased 128 times. This has made low cost, spatial sound manipulation technologies possible. They are now everywhere and the professional audio business will feed on them as they develop. 

For GCRS, these are exciting times. We are installing ATMOS in our iconic Studio 5 and a new speaker technology, all of which are specifically designed to enhance the sense of immersion. In the UK, Dolby now insists that all new rooms licensed by them have to be ATMOS. This is a tough but brave commercial stance.

The big issue on 2016's sound landscape is that there is still a paucity of playout venues and films in ATMOS or other formats. On the format front, a Betamax versus VHS style war is emerging but until sufficient venues have playback systems, the game hasn't really started. It’s a confusing battle between object-orientated gaming concepts, sound field recreation from the purists, level-panning by the pragmatists and figuring out how many speakers and where to locate them. The harsh reality for post houses is that until enough films are originated in full 3D style audio, the revenues a working studio can earn are limited, making a financial mockery of the installation of ATMOS. …But then, if we always listened to accountants, we would still be operating in mono.

In the meantime, in 2016, we will keep on mixing and crafting world class audio for commercials in stereo and 5.1, with the occasional 7.1 mix in there as well. 

Oh, and on the subject of 2016 trends, I forgot 4K – it’s stunning, even at home with compression and low bandwidth. The killer is the upscaling from HD to 4K – it is just so good. For sound, 4K ratchets up the creative quality standard required in craft skills and technically, in delivery of bandwidth all the way down to 20Hz.

To finish, and one for all the sound tech experts out there – my biggest query at the moment is this: why do binaural test subjects report reduced tracking accuracy when a 192KHz 24bit binaural recording is down sampled to 96KHz 24bit – no matter what sample rate conversion algorithm is used?

To put it simply, human hearing covers a maximum frequency range from 20 to 20,000 vibrations a second. You need both ears to work out where a sound is coming from. Your brain compares the differences between each ear to work out the location and movement of a sound's source.

In these studies, the testers started with recordings which had vibrations from 20 to 96,000 per second. This gave a very clear location and tracking of moving sound sources. When the frequency range was reduced from 20 to 48,000 vibrations per sound, the location and tracking accuracy also decreased - and listeners described the change in sound as fuzzier and de-focussed.

However, we know you can only hear a range of frequencies from 20 to 20,000 per second - so how come the testers were detecting changes in the source material well outside their range of hearing?

The answer potentially requires challenging some of the fundamental design parameters which form the basis for multichannel audio systems... game on, I say!