5 ms·

> "What’s interesting about 3D music is the possibility of making an immersive space which is capable of sustaining much more detail than a 2 dimensional space

by harry8 3y ago

> "What’s interesting about 3D music is the possibility of making an immersive space which is capable of sustaining much more detail than a 2 dimensional space (such as that presented by stereo listening)." Yeah this is what pissed me right off and made me think dark thoughts about Eno, who I usually like quite a lot for his normal habit of talking reasonably good sense. So let's just be crude engineers here. Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is very similar to 3D using glasses to make separate images each viewed only by one of your eyes. You could even go further with VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head to look at the sound source and have it move to be in front of you - maybe some VR people are doing that too but I doubt that is what is being branded "Atmos." Is it? You can achieve this 3D audio using a technique I played with as a child using a stereo cassette tape recorder. I have described how and posted a youtube link of a guy doing it (and been soundly chastised for not just saying "binaural" which is a word I learned today. Shame on me ;) Using headphones will have a higher quality ceiling for /hearing/ audio in 3 dimensional space than is possible with speakers for obvious reasons. You will not get any sound intended for the left ear only heard by the right and vice-versa. So there it is, you can do 3D "spatial" audio and do it better and do it since a very long time and "[sustain] much more detail than a 2 dimensional space" If that is your artistic goal. Stereo is good enough to do "spatial" using headphones and, in fact, will sound better and more accurate than anything, including new branded product, that uses speakers. But yeah take it with some salt because while I like music, I'm no audiophile and am consistently delighted with audio quality I can get from really quite cheap equipment. That probably makes me a bit odd in this space.

kevinmchugh 3y ago
I'm also cheap when it comes to audio gear, and can't imagine buying anything this fancy. What's interesting here is that Eno has done museum installation pieces - music designed for a specific space. The point to him is not that some sound is intended to be in your left ear, but that it's on the left side of the room, and all the sounds are positioned relative to each other, while you're free to move as you please. I could imagine Music for Airports played across an entire airport - that would be something.
- harry8 3y ago
  Yeah totally. I've had ideas like that. Installations where the lighting, imagery and sound all respond to your position in the space for example. The moment you get close to $thing a new riff is dropped in on the next beat, something else when you're no longer close. So many ways to go if you have the budget & space (and audience - I'm vain for that amount of work) to control it all. ...and now we're talking about something much more differenter than an album recorded & mixed to be heard in 3D with some brand name equipment.
colanderman 3y ago
> VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head I forget where I read recently, I think this is the intention though.
harry8 3y ago
Something else news to me today. I always thought "stereo" meant something like "two working in unison". Apparently it is from the greek meaning "solid." Hence sterophonic literally means solid (or spatial or 3d) sound (or speech). Crazy, that's obviously not how we understand it anymore. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stereophonic https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stereophonic Sterophonic adjective pertaining to a system of sound recording or reproduction using two or more separate channels to produce a more realistic effect by capturing the spatial dimensions of a performance (the location of performers as well as their acoustic surroundings), used especially with high-fidelity recordings and reproduction systems
squeaky-clean 3y ago
I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" but, without the 'head-related transfer function', (i.e. The fact that everyone's head is slightly different and it changes how you're personally used to hearing spatial sound) I think plain stereo audio can't replicate space as well for all listeners. That's why (good) atmos headphones want you to photoscan your ears and a good atmos speaker system needs a proper array of speakers surrounding you. For games it works great, much more defined locality of sounds than stereo. For music... Well I think it could work if an album was made for atmos. Not made for stereo and converted to Atmos. Another commenter mentioned the museum installations he did with music designed for a certain room. I bet those sound great in their intended spaces, I've never heard them. > You will not get any sound intended for the left ear only heard by the right and vice-versa. The fact that one ear experiences a diminished volume, a slight delay, and different reverberations is one of the major reasons we can discern sounds in 3d and not just their angle relative to our head. But hard panning like you've mentioned is still a useful musical technique and any atmos song seems to lose the ability to do that fully. Hard panning isn't realistic, but it often sounds better.
- harry8 3y ago
  Wow interesting. So given headphones can control exactly what vibrations go to each eardrum I guess without knowledge of your ear shapes (and head, nose, hair, etc) it would be like listening with the ears of someone else! I wonder how much difference I would be able to hear. But forget that, there could be an audiophile market startup here! So much opportunity for marketing. Listen to Beethoven with an authentic sound including 18th/19th century aristocratic wig! Empathise gender choosing which kind of wig to be virtually wearing. Hippie music with virtual audio long hair! Jazz club sounds with a virtual audio perm! The sound of a different size and shape nose - struggling to marketingspeak that one but I'm sure it's possible. It /has/ to happen, it's too perfect not to! Virt-audio ear perfection. "Don't be a prisoner to your head"
- coldtea 3y ago
  >I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" That's orthogonal to what the parent claims. Their take was that spatial audio is just "stereo" rebranded, as Dolby Atmos doesn't do anything, just because it's encoded into a stereo signal to play over headphones in the end. Which is obviously wrong. Your take is more like that spatial audio isn't usually a fitting experience, from an artistic perspective (not that it doesn't do anything more that what plain stereo does or that it doesn't take extra processing logic to mix into it, and extra effort to mix songs into spatial format).
coldtea 3y ago
>So let's just be crude engineers here. Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is very similar to 3D using glasses to make separate images each viewed only by one of your eyes. You could even go further with VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head to look at the sound source and have it move to be in front of you - maybe some VR people are doing that too but I doubt that is what is being branded "Atmos." Is it? Notice how none of what you describe is standard stereo, except as a base layer, and 99.99% of music available in stereo doesn't magically offer that? What stereo encoding of music in two channels can support on top of it, and the base stereo two-channel mixing and playing is not the same thing. The whole spatial experience is added on top of that. All those extra "you can just" and "you can just" that you describe need extra logic on the DAW and mixing side to control the stereo field and translate positions chosen in a spatial mixer down into relative volumes and time differences in the streo field, so that you get the spatial placement. And of course you need extra logic and sensor and real-time processing to do the head tracking. All of those are not just "stereo" the same way the web is not "just tcp", and Dropbox does not amount to the same thing as just "An FTP account, mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then SVN or CVS". And then somebody had to re-mix those tracks from Eno, using the original multi-tracks (not just the master), make decisions about spatial placement for each element, and use Dolby Atmos software in some DAW or specialized mixing too to encode this down to stereo information. (And that's just for the headphone case, Dolby Atmos extends to multi-speaker setups and cinema audio).
- harry8 3y ago
  I didn't say 3D audio was "standard stereo". What I said is that for decades you /can/ record 3D audio and then listen to it using headphones. And yes using standard 2 track stereo. I used a cassette tape recorder in the 1980s, a stereo mic and a dummy head and it was fun. Speakers won't be as good for 3D. Can't be. And you don't need any other equipment to listen to it. Everything I know about Atmos, true and false I've learned today. Atmos isn't being pushed here as studio recording & mixing tech to enable 3D but maybe somehow it is and it's one of these things that isn't any one thing and is used differently by different people at cross-purposes because at heart it doesn't know what it is? I don't know, or indeed care. Seems like you can't listen to these 3D audio albums with your regular headphones and expect a 3D sound though. The idea that this is the breakthrough Eno needed to make albums with 3D audio possible just jars with it's pure dishonesty. Do we know for sure either way if he's being paid by Dolby? You are, of course, entitled to disagree with all of that. I seem to have run head-on into a hype train, wasn't expecting that. Maybe it was opening with memories Eno himself abusing audiophiles that didn't help.
bowsamic 3y ago
> Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is simply not true
twobitshifter 3y ago
There’s a difference between stereo equipment and stereo mixes. You can do a lot with stereo equipment in terms of 3D but stereo audio mixes don’t take advantage of that. Stereo mixes don’t get into how sound localization works, the structure of ears, and the head transfer function. Atmos is emulating htf as part of the tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization

by harry8 3y ago

kevinmchugh 3y ago

I'm also cheap when it comes to audio gear, and can't imagine buying anything this fancy. What's interesting here is that Eno has done museum installation pieces - music designed for a specific space. The point to him is not that some sound is intended to be in your left ear, but that it's on the left side of the room, and all the sounds are positioned relative to each other, while you're free to move as you please. I could imagine Music for Airports played across an entire airport - that would be something.

harry8 3y ago
Yeah totally. I've had ideas like that. Installations where the lighting, imagery and sound all respond to your position in the space for example. The moment you get close to $thing a new riff is dropped in on the next beat, something else when you're no longer close. So many ways to go if you have the budget & space (and audience - I'm vain for that amount of work) to control it all. ...and now we're talking about something much more differenter than an album recorded & mixed to be heard in 3D with some brand name equipment.

colanderman 3y ago

> VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head I forget where I read recently, I think this is the intention though.

harry8 3y ago

Something else news to me today. I always thought "stereo" meant something like "two working in unison". Apparently it is from the greek meaning "solid." Hence sterophonic literally means solid (or spatial or 3d) sound (or speech). Crazy, that's obviously not how we understand it anymore. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stereophonic https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stereophonic Sterophonic adjective pertaining to a system of sound recording or reproduction using two or more separate channels to produce a more realistic effect by capturing the spatial dimensions of a performance (the location of performers as well as their acoustic surroundings), used especially with high-fidelity recordings and reproduction systems

squeaky-clean 3y ago

I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" but, without the 'head-related transfer function', (i.e. The fact that everyone's head is slightly different and it changes how you're personally used to hearing spatial sound) I think plain stereo audio can't replicate space as well for all listeners. That's why (good) atmos headphones want you to photoscan your ears and a good atmos speaker system needs a proper array of speakers surrounding you. For games it works great, much more defined locality of sounds than stereo. For music... Well I think it could work if an album was made for atmos. Not made for stereo and converted to Atmos. Another commenter mentioned the museum installations he did with music designed for a certain room. I bet those sound great in their intended spaces, I've never heard them. > You will not get any sound intended for the left ear only heard by the right and vice-versa. The fact that one ear experiences a diminished volume, a slight delay, and different reverberations is one of the major reasons we can discern sounds in 3d and not just their angle relative to our head. But hard panning like you've mentioned is still a useful musical technique and any atmos song seems to lose the ability to do that fully. Hard panning isn't realistic, but it often sounds better.

harry8 3y ago
Wow interesting. So given headphones can control exactly what vibrations go to each eardrum I guess without knowledge of your ear shapes (and head, nose, hair, etc) it would be like listening with the ears of someone else! I wonder how much difference I would be able to hear. But forget that, there could be an audiophile market startup here! So much opportunity for marketing. Listen to Beethoven with an authentic sound including 18th/19th century aristocratic wig! Empathise gender choosing which kind of wig to be virtually wearing. Hippie music with virtual audio long hair! Jazz club sounds with a virtual audio perm! The sound of a different size and shape nose - struggling to marketingspeak that one but I'm sure it's possible. It /has/ to happen, it's too perfect not to! Virt-audio ear perfection. "Don't be a prisoner to your head"
coldtea 3y ago
>I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" That's orthogonal to what the parent claims. Their take was that spatial audio is just "stereo" rebranded, as Dolby Atmos doesn't do anything, just because it's encoded into a stereo signal to play over headphones in the end. Which is obviously wrong. Your take is more like that spatial audio isn't usually a fitting experience, from an artistic perspective (not that it doesn't do anything more that what plain stereo does or that it doesn't take extra processing logic to mix into it, and extra effort to mix songs into spatial format).

coldtea 3y ago

>So let's just be crude engineers here. Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is very similar to 3D using glasses to make separate images each viewed only by one of your eyes. You could even go further with VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head to look at the sound source and have it move to be in front of you - maybe some VR people are doing that too but I doubt that is what is being branded "Atmos." Is it? Notice how none of what you describe is standard stereo, except as a base layer, and 99.99% of music available in stereo doesn't magically offer that? What stereo encoding of music in two channels can support on top of it, and the base stereo two-channel mixing and playing is not the same thing. The whole spatial experience is added on top of that. All those extra "you can just" and "you can just" that you describe need extra logic on the DAW and mixing side to control the stereo field and translate positions chosen in a spatial mixer down into relative volumes and time differences in the streo field, so that you get the spatial placement. And of course you need extra logic and sensor and real-time processing to do the head tracking. All of those are not just "stereo" the same way the web is not "just tcp", and Dropbox does not amount to the same thing as just "An FTP account, mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then SVN or CVS". And then somebody had to re-mix those tracks from Eno, using the original multi-tracks (not just the master), make decisions about spatial placement for each element, and use Dolby Atmos software in some DAW or specialized mixing too to encode this down to stereo information. (And that's just for the headphone case, Dolby Atmos extends to multi-speaker setups and cinema audio).

harry8 3y ago
I didn't say 3D audio was "standard stereo". What I said is that for decades you /can/ record 3D audio and then listen to it using headphones. And yes using standard 2 track stereo. I used a cassette tape recorder in the 1980s, a stereo mic and a dummy head and it was fun. Speakers won't be as good for 3D. Can't be. And you don't need any other equipment to listen to it. Everything I know about Atmos, true and false I've learned today. Atmos isn't being pushed here as studio recording & mixing tech to enable 3D but maybe somehow it is and it's one of these things that isn't any one thing and is used differently by different people at cross-purposes because at heart it doesn't know what it is? I don't know, or indeed care. Seems like you can't listen to these 3D audio albums with your regular headphones and expect a 3D sound though. The idea that this is the breakthrough Eno needed to make albums with 3D audio possible just jars with it's pure dishonesty. Do we know for sure either way if he's being paid by Dolby? You are, of course, entitled to disagree with all of that. I seem to have run head-on into a hype train, wasn't expecting that. Maybe it was opening with memories Eno himself abusing audiophiles that didn't help.

bowsamic 3y ago

> Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is simply not true

twobitshifter 3y ago

There’s a difference between stereo equipment and stereo mixes. You can do a lot with stereo equipment in terms of 3D but stereo audio mixes don’t take advantage of that. Stereo mixes don’t get into how sound localization works, the structure of ears, and the head transfer function. Atmos is emulating htf as part of the tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization