The Liberation of Sound.
The Rise of Spatial Audio as a medium.
By Jacqueline Bosnjak.
A Talk Presented at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Cannes, France 2023.
“I dream of instruments obedient to my thought; where the musician is free to create an entirely new kind of music, one that is capable of expressing the infinite possibilities of sound in a completely new way. A musical universe of his own, with its own laws, dimensions and time, and explore new sound worlds and sound forms which have never been heard before”.
- Edgard Varèse, French-born American composer opening statement to his lecture “The Liberation of Sound” from 1964.
Varese, the prophet of the liberation of sound, believed this could only be achieved with the help of science and technology. For Varèse’s the computer was the new frontier.
A Renaissance is happening in sound, where the sounds of our world can now be explored in an entirely new immersive way through spatial audio.
For decades, we have been blocked from experiencing sound naturally when listening with headphones due to being, literally, ‘locked in stereo’. Just like the invention of electric magnetic tape recorder opened up a whole new world to iconic composers like John Cage. Today new hardware with embedded IMUs, enabled by spatial audio technology like Mach1, have removed the technical limitations of locked stereo, enabling a new medium to emerge: spatial audio.
Spatial audio is not a new concept; however, what has changed is our capability to record and deliver it to the listener using new readily available consumer hardware and software at scale.
Tracing its roots back to the early ‘call and response’ of psalmody, like the early chants by Hildegard of Bingen in the Middle Ages, who found unique ways to create antiphones — short chants sung as refrains during the Mass, such as when the priest sings a long line and then the people in attendance answer with a short phrase — which creates a spatialized effect, as they stand in different places.
As far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, works like Giovanni Gabrieli’s “In Ecclesiis” were written specifically for a polychoral setting in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Fast-forwarding to Charles Ives’ “Unanswered Question” of the 1930s, which featured a solo trumpet questioning against a background of slow, quiet strings, only to be met with an unsuccessful attempt to answer from a woodwind quartet that grows more dissonant. Edgard Varèse’s 1958 Electronic Poem, presented at the Brussels World’s Fair, finally achieved sound movement for the first time, utilizing 450 speakers, four projectors, and colorful lights with audio engineers synchronizing speaker arrays with accompanying films by Le Corbusier. Stockhausen’s much later ‘Helicopter String Quartet’ (1990s) was perhaps the most extreme boundary-pushing, requiring a String Quartet to board four separate helicopters during its performance.
We are not just looking to the masters of the past, but connecting and expanding on their core values and motivations, ensuring that we bring ourselves as craftsmen to emerging mediums.
To reveal a new world is the function of creation in all the arts. Artists are now able, as never before, to satisfy the dictates of that inner ear of the imagination and brands have an opportunity to commission ground breaking new content that could never have existed before. But we must ensure artists are not hampered by esthetic codification of tech companies and be wary of musical morticians embalming rules into our systems. Defending craft matters!
Spatial audio is an innovative medium that is revolutionizing the way we create and experience content, enabling the liberation of sound in its truest sense. Artists are eager to explore the creative possibilities this medium offers, rather than simply viewing it as a “feature”, “room modeling effect,” or marketing gimmick. For their creativity to be unleashed, leading technological companies such as Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud and Meta must provide creators with the control they are seeking.
As the lines between the real and digital worlds continue to blur, it is essential to have audio interoperability across devices, platforms and workflows. To this end, Mach1 is a sound technology company devoted to unifying multi-channel and spatial audio, providing developers and creators with an integrative framework that enables full creative freedom.
We want to build a world that values artists, sound, and craftsmanship: Defenders of the Audio Realm is our mission statement and what drives us. AI and robots will do the scut-work of society, and human beings will find themselves living a life of leisure, free to engage in scientific research, literature, and the arts.
We anticipate that consumers will gain a better understanding of immersive sensor inputs. As a result, more products will be able to utilize user head tracking, orientation, and positioning to create truly unique content experiences. We anticipate that with the increasing capability of hardware, sound-driven content could make a lasting impression, similar to how Orson Welles’ legendary “War of the Worlds” revolutionized radio.
On Oct. 30, 1938, millions of radio listeners in the US heard “The War of the World’s,” a gripping and realistic radio play by H.G. Wells about an alien invasion of the US causing a widespread panic. Some believed it was an actual news broadcast.
What kind of projects have we done and what do we see coming in the near future here are a couple of projects where we have incorporated spatial audio from the beginning.
‘Music of the Sphere’s –
MOTET: HARMONIES OF THE WORLD
DAVE SOLDIER • JOHANNES KEPLER •EKMELES •SPATIAL AUDIO PRODUCED BY DRAŽEN BOŠNJAK
In 1619, Johannes Kepler published his treatise on a mathematical view of the universe as a celestial music box. He detailed elliptical planets’ orbits around the sun and compared them to notes in a chord, urging composers to set his equations to music. Many musicians have attempted this over the decades. Dave Sulzer, a neuroscientist and musician at Columbia, figured out the math and wanted it recorded. In Sulzer’s piece, as per Kepler’s instructions, the parts of Saturn and Jupiter were sung by basses, Mars by a tenor, Earth and Venus by altos, and Mercury by a soprano. Kepler wanted listeners to feel as if they were standing on the surface of the sun, hearing the harmony of the spheres as the planets circled around them we achieved Kepler’s desired effect with Mach1 technology. . “The planets rotate around the listener, who are in the central position of the sun as intended by Kepler, using Dražen’s technology at speeds related to the log transformation of their orbital periods” says Soldier. Convinced we might open a wormhole in the space-time continuum. Sulzer relayed to us in our studio in Tribeca: “That’s what Kepler was looking for — a moment of consonance in the universe”. “Usually it’s not there. But, when it is, it’s evidence that God did something right.” You can read more about it in The New Yorker feature here
Eli Keszler Icons+ LuckyMe Records
Eli Keszler, a percussionist and composer, partnered with Mach1 Team to collaborate and offer a 3-dimensional experience of his album ‘Icons+.’ His collaboration with Mach1 Spatial System allowed him to fulfill his original goal: “Mach1 Spatial System offered the chance to realize what I set out for with Icons originally,” states Keszler. “To create a fully immersive experience of being able to walk through these recordings with infinite angles and perspectives instead of listening to them from a fixed point.”
Into The Light: Yo-Yo Ma (AR)
An AR mapped immersive installation that utilized QR code anchors and complex spatial audio mixes which allowed the listener to move through the movements of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Unaccompanied Cello Suite №2 in D Minor,” performed by the legendary Yo-Yo Ma. The Mach1 Spatial SDK was used in Unity to enable head-tracking orientation with Bose IMU-enabled headphones. The installation, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, was directed by Jessica Brillhart.
By collaborating: artists, physicists, mathematicians, and developers can re-establish the link between music and science, which was prevalent during the Middle Ages, and create new, more efficient devices.
Futuristic brands and tech have the opportunity to be patrons of this new medium. I can’t wait to see what they do with Mach1.
We’d love to collaborate with you on the Rewilding of the ears!
