I have an admission to make to you, this lovely community of people who care about sound and communication skills and subscribe to my Substack.
I have to tell you that I am inveterately hopeless at rigorous posting. Unless something happens at the same time every day, my way of living entirely in the moment means that I go on journeys, disappear down rabbit holes, become fascinated by something extraordinary or beautiful, and then come upon for air to realise that I just missed a call or a meeting, or, as I have just done, that I haven’t posted here for weeks.
There are people here who post multiple times a day; the received wisdom is at least weekly to keep people engaged. So, I humbly thank you for your patience. I can only hope that when I do post, it’s valuable enough to keep you here. I will do my best to keep the nuggets rolling towards you with some sort of regularity. I hope that Substack is a broad enough church to accept people who fail to conform to the posting norms, just as it embraces all sorts of content.
Anyway, back to the present… I had an amazing experience last week at an extraordinary new immersive sound demo facility tucked away in north London.
This is the new demo suite created by L-Acoustics to show off their new system, HYRISS, which (almost) stands for hyperreal immersive sound spaces. You may not know the name L-Acoustics, but you will almost certainly have heard their excellent audio products if you’ve been to a concert in the last few years. Their founder Christian Heil invented the line array and thus revolutionised live sound, while more recently their L-ISA spatial sound mixing and performance software has created stunning spatial sound experiences at gigs and installations worldwide and is used by spatial sound pathfinders like Steven Wilson.
HYRISS takes L-ISA to a new level by adding extra sound processing capabilities – and the perfect delivery tool: the room in the picture has over 60 loudspeakers installed, with line arrays and subs behind the panels on every wall, as well as a range of microphones. The control software, driven from a tablet, can add or remove reverberation, turning the room from a studio to a concert hall. It can deliver nature soundscapes with each sound accurately placed in three-dimensional space. Most impressively, it can extract a single instrument from a stereo music mix and move just that one instrument from one wall to another, putting the listener in charge of the listening experience in a way that’s never been possible before.
We enjoyed relaxing and enveloping nature sound as the room became a wellbeing retreat, revelled in movie sound that was beyond anything Atmos could deliver in a cinema, and couldn’t help moving to the beat as the room became a top nightclub with distortion-free power from all directions, the like of which I’ve never experienced before. The combination of quality and flexibility was stunning.
It was a thrill to meet Christian in person, along with the charming company President Laurent Vaissié and my old friend Tim Boot. This room is a Mecca for anyone interested in immersive/spatial sound and it shows what’s achievable with modern digital sound software, opening up limitless possibilities for exhibitions, galleries, installations, the hospitality industry and those who are lucky enough to be able to afford something like this in their home. That’s sadly not me, but this was an experience I will never forget.
I’m travelling for the next two weeks to give a talk in Phoenix at the Buffini & Co annual conference, and then take a week’s holiday with the children. So here are two audio nuggets to keep you going, along with a full podcast for the paying subscribers
Audio 1: Requests - a lovely distinction that can defuse a lot of the potential explosions we encounter in relationships at work and at home.
Audio 2: Questions - the value of questioning technique, especially for those who don’t always feel heard.
Podcast: this is a wonderful episode on the great animal orchestra - the sound of living things (apart from us) with an interview with my dear friend Bernie Krause, who started out as a folk musician, virtually invented synthesizer music working with everyone you can think of, then had a glittering second career as the world’s most esteemed nature sound recordist. There’s also an interview with Richard Blackford, who composed the brilliant Great Animal Orchestra Symphony using Bernie’s nature sound samples along with a full orchestra to miraculous effect. Enjoy.
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