SoundLab residency 2nd report.

Covering the second week in house and the following decompression/disillusion.

Week 2 the novelty wore off and my mood turned in general. It’s lovely to have access to a space where you can hear things in a special way, but it’s disconnected from wider sonic culture. What happens in the room stays in the room, unless you translate it and that – in a way – defeats the utility of a special room. I created mixes that sounded right when my head was exactly in the the sweet spot of the room. I could save the settings that created the mix, but they would then need to be revised to hear things almost as they were, as drawn from memory.

When working with 16 speakers you tend to focus on their exact positions. Sounds tend to be better when exactly placed here or there. When you bring the mix home you will not have such specificity, you will want to feel it coming from ‘below’ or ‘ behind’ and other semi-emotional locations. It’s not the same music.

This is troubling because my goal is the general distribution of music and breaking down the barriers of cost, staging etc. The people will not come to the mountain, it will have to become their own little hill. So during the week I started on a different path. I have 6 weeks before the next residency, let’s use them well.

It is most likely that people will hear surround mixes on Netflix, on Apple devices, in cinemas and so on. That means Dolby ATMOS. I’m not gaining much from the SoundLab in terms of reaching this specification – that comes from the grant from CreateNSW. I already had REAPER and Nuendo through my own funds. REAPER is a best for mixing ambisonics, Nuendo is able to scale these to 7.1.2, can add all the object orientated channels (I’m still not ready to use) and output a properly formatted ATMOS Wave file. This just then needs to be rendered as an ATMOS MP4 which can only be done on Dolby Renderer on a very recent OSX machine. Can do.

This MP4 file is only supposed to be quality control, but if I can hear it on my devices I can let other people hear it on theirs. The rest is distribution – and there’s plenty of DIY opportunity there.

Technically the next step to investigate is up-mixing – taking stereo and 5.1 and staging it in a surround environment. I’m testing four candidates. The cheap one is trash. The old one is tired. The fancy one is very good but the brightly clown coloured one might be better. It’s not the most expensive one but hoo boy none of them are cheap. But you want your music to sound right. Right?