Audio Developer Conference

Since stereo began, audio has been delivered to listeners as separate ready-to-use channels, each of which is routed to a loudspeaker somewhere around them. Immersive Audio [IA] supplements this familiar approach with numerous unmixed objects: sources with nominal properties and positions. These objects are able to move, and must therefore be rendered by some means to fit whatever loudspeaker array is at hand. Like almost all brand-new music technology, IA is a morass of vested interests, unfinished software, ugly workflows, and hyperbolic statements made by people who really ought to know better.

Quite a few businesses and academics are striving to improve IA in different directions. For now, your choice as an Immersive-embracing producer is between picking a technology vendor and allocating them a chunk of your fixed and variable costs for evermore, or to go it alone with conventional tools and plug-ins and risk catastrophe. (Or, at worst, risk a passable 5.1 mix.) Things are just as confusing for customers.

If you're a music producer, where (and why) do you start? Where can you go to be inspired by examples of IA being used well? How do you deliver your finished project to consumers? As an engineer attempting to build the tools and infrastructures that support next year's workflows, what can you expect customers to demand of you?

And why should you — as a music lover, trained listener, and highly-educated consumer of music technology — care about any of this stuff? Behind the hype, is IA worthwhile? In a world where mixing audio into anything more than two channels is still a niche pursuit, will it ever matter?

I am a solo inventor in this field, and needed to research these questions in order to eat. I present the best answers I can, volunteer a perspective on the state of the art, and suggest the Immersive Audio equivalent of the Millennium Prize problems. If we can solve these together, we can all win.