Applied multichannel recording of a contemporary symphony orchestra for virtual reality

Reed, Luke; Harries, Martyn; Hurr, Alexandre; Knight, Mathew

Abstract

Capturing musical performances for Virtual Reality (VR) is of growing interest to engineers, cultural organisations and the public. The application of ambisonic workflows in conjunction with binauralisation through head related transfer functions enables perception and localisation of sound sources within three dimensional space, crucially enabling height perception. While there are many excellent examples of orchestral recordings in VR, however, few make use of the height perception and favour ‘on stage’ horizontal positioning. This engineering brief presents a contemporary symphony orchestral performance captured with multichannel spot recordings and produced in second order ambisonics in which 51 performers were individually split and positioned across five levels of the performance space. The paper looks to critically discuss the methods employed addressing the workflow through pre-production, capture and post-production.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2019 AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio
• Start Date: Mar 17, 2019
• End Date: Mar 17, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Feb 22, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Mar 17, 2019
• Publication Date: Mar 17, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 1, 2019
• Pages: 105
• Book Title: 2019 AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio
• Keywords: cinematic, VR, 360 film, ambisonics, contemporary, orchestra, spatial, 3D, audio, workflow
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/851913
• Publisher URL: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=20441