There is still something missing from THX trailers.
Maybe it’s that you cannot properly listen to spatial audio on YouTube or a home theatre.
Or maybe the artists and geniuses at THX and the creative houses have overlooked more subtle ways to curate an example of how spatial audio can trigger a heightened sense of reality. Let you feel a scene through the sound alone. Put you in the space while at the same time, obliterate the confinement of your real world and open a door to a vast space that goes far beyond the screen.
Homage or not, another helicopter flying overhead isn’t going to do it. This is the age of video games that can transport you into a universe in your control. Dynamic and interactive, today’s director has to compose a scene that makes you want to take your hands off the wheel and hang on for the ride.
The Forest.
The screen is black. There is no sound. You are wrapped in the complete and total darkness of the movie theatre.
From the right, a pale blue dot glows into existence. Flitting about on what sound like tiny wings, weaving in and out of unseen obstacles in the dark, only briefly and dimly illuminating the world around her. Even when you cannot see her, you can hear her. You can close your eyes and know where she is.
The screen suddenly sparkles. A slow moving river of shimmering particles comes alive at her touch, winding through the blackness still enveloping you. She glides above the surface, skating over the disturbance and causing ripples of sound — rocks gently babbling on water — to splash all around you.
Everything she touches, is made out of sound. She picks up her diligent task, awakening the sounds of what feel like a forest around you. The room comes alive with the sound of all manner of creatures, the wind rustling through the leaves, all soft, but enveloping.
The sun rises. What comes with it, is a sound deep, but far away. She hears it too. The sky grows lighter by the moment, revealing a tribe of tiny beings of all shapes and sizes, huddling as the sound grows louder, draws closer, and intensifies the illumination of the scene.
The Escape.
The deep note is now rumbling through the forest. The pale blue dot reaches for you and grabs you, dragging you behind her frantically through the air — over, under, and through — the dense undergrowth. Your flight path takes you over the stampeding sounds of insects. Rabbits and Deer running from the sound, burst into the scene, sending you tumbling and spinning as they run past to your left, then to your right, their paws and feet shaking the ground as they go.
She takes a stand. The camera whips around to see THX approaching. Tearing out trees by the roots and levitating them in the air with the vibration of the wind, until all you hear is a swirling maelstrom all around you.
With a wave of her hand, there is only the Deep Note(tm). She gathers all of the light imbued by her touch and directs it at THX in a brilliant flash of light that brings about a crescendo. All you hear is the Deep Note fading away; rocks, dirt, and trees orbit weightlessly around it. As suddenly as it began, the Deep Note is gone, the magicks spent, and the debris comes crashing down all around to lay at your feet.
She coughs, she giggles, and flitters away in her signature zig zaggy pattern, deeper and deeper into the forest she just introduced you to.
The end.
One silly little narrative to describe an action sequence in sound that could do so much more to demonstrate what this technology can do, better than a helicopter flying overhead. If there was ever an audio cliché, it’s that.
