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The Inside Story
We spoke to Cathy Robinson, the Audio Supervisor who created the binaural mix for this recording of the Super Furry Animals
How did the pilot come about?
We had the opportunity to film multiple 360 camera positions at the Super Furry Animals gig at Cardiff Motorpoint arena, capturing multiple perspectives in 360 to create a virtual gig experience what it would be like to be in the audience and on the stage with the band.
This presented itself as an interesting challenge to try to represent the sound from each location in a way that was both pleasing on the ear and allowed sounds to rotate with the 360 image.
We have a facility to create this type of sound mix at 大象传媒 Wales using technology developed by 大象传媒 R&D. We've used it for other types of content for example the sound for the 360 films for Planet Earth 2 and binaural radio drama, so it was a fantastic opportunity for us to experiment with a live music scenario in a large concert venue.
Each location was filmed using a 360 camera so why not just put a 360 mic at each of the camera positions?
Seems logical but what would actually happen is that you would not have much control in the post-production of the mix. You wouldn't be able to rotate the sound, and generally everything sounds 'off mic', woolly and with no definition.
What we were able to do was take a multi-track recording of each of the sources on stage. These could then be mixed to sound like a representation of the location being filmed, so you can hear a nice blend of all the sources but with each source given its own location in the 360 sphere as an ‘object’. Once the sound object has its own position this can, then be moved with the 360 video giving you a much greater immersive audio effect.
We had complete control over the sound mix in levels and space. During the concert I also recorded lots of separate locations of the audience, which I used to create that live feel and sense of distance from the stage during the shots within the audience.
What do you hope to learn from the pilot?
It was amazing to get such great access to the concert visually and sonically, and has proved to be an incredibly useful audio experiment paving the way forward for creating truly immersive live music virtual reality experiences in the future. We are interest to see what the audience makes of it.
