Surround Sound with Height

I’m currently working on a research project into 3D audio and this has so far mainly been focused on Ambisonics and recent 3D microphone techniques. Ambsonics means audio periphony (‘Full-sphere Surround Sound’). This technology has been around for over 40 years. Many people have set up these soundsystems with height as well as speakers around the listeners.

To start you off I recommend you watch this video with Andrew Mason giving a really good talk on details about this technology. Click on this link to view the 13min video. http://bit.ly/1s9FmZG

Ambisonics is not new. It’s been around a long time… So what is new.

Dolby Atmos – Prior to launching it’s new cinema system Dolby Laboratories bought Barcelona-based Ambisonics ‘imm sound’. Though undisclosed this does show that to me that Dolby have used the technology as part of there new system. Read more here http://bit.ly/1wsCvAB

Auro3D – again a system that uses three layers of height speakers including speakers above the listener which is Ambisonics at it’s best. See more here at their website including videos http://bit.ly/1A75lKq

3D Gaming is now becoming more and more popular with gamers buying high quality headphones to listen to games with 3D audio. Game developers looking to get more out of 3D audio during game programming can check out several websites for tools including the Blue Ripple Sound http://bit.ly/1ock4OM and also RealSpace3DAudio using Unity Plugins http://bit.ly/10g0c1V.

There are many more areas as we use 3D audio to complement 3D video and Virtual Reality experiences. Playstation 4 will soon have it’s missing part the Sony Morpheus picture above. Go here to see a recent review by TechRadar: http://bit.ly/10g0fuD

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the developing technology, I have found, are the microphones that are being created to capture 3D soundscapes. Ten years ago the only microphone you could use was a SoundField microphone with four capsules capturing 3D soundscapes in a rough detail. Now it is possible to get the RealSpace Audio Panoramic Camera consisting of 64 micrphones and 5 HD video cameras!!! 64 microphones is a serious amount of information. This microphone records for only 630 seconds and in that time using USB3.0 creates no less than 51GBs of data. At the same time it records 5 HD camera footage via firewire!! very cool stuff.

Recent work by Salford University and the BBC has been looking at how height systems could benefit broadcasting and which type of systems to use if they did. You can read more about the joint project here. http://bbc.in/1xUycfq Finally there has been some recent work to investigate 3D audio from a football game. The game would be recorded using wave field synthesis as well as Ambsonics to create a full immersion scene. http://bit.ly/1t7g51H. I will be discussing this research in detail in later posts. I hope this gives you some food for thought.

I will be do another blog soon with more details on Ambisonics and how I will be doing some of my own 3D audio experiments. Watch this space.

Audi 3D-Sound with Bang & Olufsen at CES

Found this short video online talking about one of the first cars to have height speakers built within the car design. This type of speaker placement puts the audio inside the car at head height rather than at waist height which is the most common placement level of current car audio systems. This is a big move forward for 3-D sound.

This type of car audio does create two questions:

1. Will radio every be broadcast using this technology?

2. Will there be much content created within the music business to make use of these extra speakers or will there just be a ‘Wow’ button on the car stereo panel?