First-Ever AES Immersive Audio Academy To Explore Emerging Technologies

Immersive and binaural audio will be explored in new series

The Audio Engineering Society’s first-ever AES Immersive Audio Academy, taking place online today from noon to 9:00 p.m. ET, launches a series focusing on the latest production and emerging technologies in immersive and binaural audio.

Requiring registration to participate, the program’s Workshop and Masterclass sessions will take on diverse applications of immersive-audio production: from live events to gaming, movies, and beyond. After completing the sessions, participants will receive a certificate of achievement.

The event is sponsored by Gold Partner Genelec, Silver Partner Dolby Atmos, and Bronze Partners Fraunhofer, L-Acoustics, New Audio Technology, and Sound Particles. Registration is $49 for AES members and $99 for non-members, with members also receiving access to on-demand playback of the sessions.

The Audio Engineering Society has been a hub for exchange of information and ideas in development of immersive-audio technology and standards. The AES Immersive Audio Academy will open with “Introduction & Immersive Audio Past, Present & Future,” co-chaired by Steve Martz and Andres Mayo, followed by the Genelec partner session “Immersive Audio for Music: A Practical Session To Develop From Stereo to Immersive.” “Immersive Audio for Live Events,” providing insight into the challenges and opportunities in immersive-sound reinforcement, will be hosted by Etienne Corteel and Scott Sugden of L-Acoustics.

Further implementation of immersive-audio practices will be discussed by Facebook Reality Labs’ Scott Selfon in the session “Audio Futures: Technologies for Games,” a look at the immersive worlds of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality and their implications for current games, both screen- based and head-mounted-display-based. The following session, “Immersive in Recording/Conversion to Dolby Atmos,” will take an in-depth look at the Grammy-winning album Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? by Fantastic Negrito (Xavier Dphrepaulezz), who will take part in the discussion, along with the album’s engineer, Nahuel Bronzini, and Mastering Engineer Michael Romanowski, who handled the Atmos mixing and mastering.

Featured Workshop and Masterclass “Producing High-Quality Immersive Audio” offers an intensive three-hour hands-on session unveiling secrets of 360 audio production, hosted by Andres Mayo (@360MusicLab) with Brian Glasscock (Sennheiser) and Achim Fell (Dear Reality). Attendees will learn to capture and mix 3D audio using object-oriented solutions and will be able to create immersive content suitable for a variety of applications, such as live concerts, studio recordings, advertising, gaming, VR, AR, and esports. At the end of the Masterclass, Mayo will conduct a drawing giving registrants the opportunity to win an Avid ProTools license.

In “Immersive in Movies,” John Kellogg and Brian Slack of Xperi/DTS will demonstrate a system whereby an immersive-audio mix can be acoustically encoded into 5.1, then decoded back to an immersive environment, allowing single delivery of 5.1 audio suited for use in any sound field: mono, stereo, 5.1, 7.1, and immersive, as well as speaker and headphone virtualization.

Register at aesshow.com/immersive for the first event in AES’s series dedicated to immersive audio and related technologies.