Recent developments in spatial audio — albums old and new
being mixed for immersive formats — have made news in the world of pop.
Given the right production process (in the studio) and tech
setup (at home), headphone sounds no longer need feel so statically pressed to
each ear; instead, they can seem to whiz around your head or beckon from the
nape of your neck.
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Or simply breathe anew. Whether you’re focusing on a stray
slide-guitar accent in the Dolby Atmos mix of Taylor Swift’s “Mine (Taylor’s
Version)” or appreciating the serrated details of brass-arrangement filigree in
Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, 3D feel
of large-speaker arrays into your ears.
But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche
Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or
four-channel releases — in the 1970s. More recently, binaural recordings and
mixes, designed to simulate that 3D feel, have been a delight. Now, though,
these and other spatial-production practices are enjoying deeper corporate
investment, including head-tracking technology as a feature of Apple’s newest
Beats headphones. (When you move your head while wearing these — with the
tracking option enabled — sound-points seem to stay fixed in your 360-degree
field, even if you swerve about.)
Head-tracking seemed largely pointless to me — even distracting
— until I tried it with the new archival recording “Evenings at the Village
Gate,” featuring John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.
Hearing Dolphy’s bass clarinet in front of my face — in a
way that remained stable, even when I shook my head in wonder at his playing —
allowed me the fleeting sensation that I was sharing space with the legend. A
neat trick, though not one more important than Dolphy’s or Coltrane’s playing
on its own terms.
Around the time that recording was made, classical composers
were bringing spatialized concepts into their creative practice. Even before
the comparatively meek technology of two-channel stereo sound was standard in
every home, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were using more complex mixes for
works involving electronics or taped elements.
There’s a reason Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the
cultural worthies on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band”: The composer’s works, such as “Gesang der Jünglinge,” from 1956,
employed a five-speaker mix (including one on the ceiling). That made a lasting
impression on Paul McCartney, who once described “Gesang” as his favorite
“plick-plop” piece by Stockhausen.
Now more traditional corners of the classical music world
are getting in on spatial audio as well.
Leading conductors in the orchestral world — including
Riccardo Muti and Esa-Pekka Salonen — have personally approved spatial audio
mixes of their recent recordings, which have been released on Apple Music and
its stand-alone classical streaming app. And, as with other genres, Apple has
gathered playlists of spatialized remixes.
The regular players in classical music’s immersive cohort
have meanwhile continued to ply their trade: Members of SWR Experimentalstudio
came to the Time Spans Festival in New York this month, bringing surround-sound
works by Italian modernist Luigi Nono. And American composer-saxophonist
Anthony Braxton brought a new surround-sound concept, “Thunder Music,” to the
Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany.
Those live performances were terrific. It’s a different
story on recordings: After listening to a variety of Dolby Atmos mixes
recently, I sensed that classical music’s more mainstream slate of spatial
offerings remains a work in progress.
Somewhere in between was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of
a spatial audio concept by Stockhausen, at the Shed in New York this summer.
Its 124-speaker setup encircled about 200 listeners at a time. In early July, I
heard a new mix of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” that suffered from
muddy bass frequencies. This, unfortunately, also robbed the work of its
chiseled, minimalist grace; instead of following the bass clarinet lines, you
just guessed that they were there. A sense of drama had been frittered away.
Similarly, some selections you can find in Apple Music’s
“Classical in Spatial Audio” playlists seem poorly selected for the format. A
recording of a profound solo work such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The
Well-Tempered Clavier” isn’t exactly crying out for the spatial treatment. But
when it receives one — as in an otherwise pleasant recording by Fazil Say — it
merely sounds like it’s had its reverb levels jacked to the sky. It’s more
distracting than moving. Such extraneous mixes are also a poor advertisement
for what Dolby Atmos can provide when applied to the right repertoire.
For a contrast, look to the opening work on the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra’s recent album “Contemporary American Composers,” Jessie
Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.” That track is plenty inviting in its regular
stereo mix; even as its singable opening motif is passed between sections,
taking on new timbral colors, it never loses its openhearted sense of
invitation. In the Dolby Atmos mix on Apple Music, that enveloping effect
deepens. The spaces among bowed strings, brasses and percussion are wider. A
centrally mixed pizzicato line takes on an even more dramatic, bridging role.
The orchestra’s audio engineer, Charlie Post, said in an
interview that “contemporary music seems to lend itself particularly well for
this.” And he related how, since joining the Chicago Symphony in 2014, he’s
been “future-proofing” sessions by recording with more microphones than are
strictly necessary for radio broadcast or archival purposes. Now, when a format
like Dolby Atmos comes into play, the ensemble is ready with a robust
audio-capture program — think of it as a highly detailed orchestral data set —
from each performance.
After working with producer David Frost and spatial-mixing
expert Silas Brown, Post is then required to get the signoff from Riccardo
Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s music director. Post recalled that when the
conductor, wearing Sennheiser headphones, heard a binaural rendering of the
2018 album “Italian Masterworks,” he counted himself impressed — and gave the
ensemble’s spatial-audio team his blessing to do more in this realm.
“He thought it was more wide and pleasing to him,” Post
said. “So that was a great thumbs-up to get.”
At the San Francisco Symphony, Salonen has been equally
enthusiastic — and even more hands-on — with engineers as he plots coming
performances and releases.
“We have a very, very good team, so they don’t need any kind
of mothering,” he said in a video interview. “But I’m just fascinated by the
process myself, because it’s a new kind of mixing. When you position sound
objects in 360 space, it becomes like a superfun computer game — very
entertaining. And there are some musical artistic gains which are not gimmicky.
It doesn’t have to be technology for the sake of technology; there can be an
expressive purpose.”
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