[BBC]

Here’s a short post about a 3D sound experiment that BBC R&D’s audio team conducted the other week in collaboration with BBC Radio 2.

As part of the BBC Audio Research Partnership, that was launched earlier in the summer, we are looking at potential next generation audio formats. You may have read some of our work into ambisonics hereand there. If you want some more detailed information about what we’ve done, you can read this paper of ours, which is available from the AES. I think the headline from the paper was that first-order ambisonics is not as good as traditional channel-based audio, like 5.1 surround, for (what can be considered) point sources, but it does work very well for reverberation and diffuse sounds. With this in mind we spotted an opportunity to conduct an experiment using a hybrid of ambisonics and normal channel based audio.

Elbow, the Manchester band, were planning a homecoming gig in Manchester Cathedral.  …It would also allow us to improve our understanding of challenges and compromises faced when integrating 3D audio capture and mixing and into real-world live production environment.  …

We could have just recorded the microphone signals without worrying too much about how it sounded, but we thought that it would be nice to at least try to monitor the 3D recording.  …  Normally the Realiser is used to monitor 5.1 surround sound, but we calibrated the system with a cube of 8 speakers to allow us to monitor sound in 3D. It even has a head tracker to keep sounds horizontally stationary relative to small lateral movements of your head.  …

Along with the ambisonics microphone signals we recorded all the individual sources (about 50 of them) to allow us to remix the recording in our listening room. We have developed our own spatial audio 3D panner that allows us to position each of the sources anywhere in the 3D soundscape and over the next month or so we will experiment with a number of different spatial mixes of the recording to assess which is generally preferred.

We learnt (and are still learning) a lot from this experiment and will be publishing results and analysis over the coming months.  …

Read the full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2011/11/elbow-in-3d-sound.shtml