Mach1 Rolls Out Spatial Audio Format For VR/AR
VR audio technology company Mach1 announced its patent-pending Mach1 Spatial Audio Playback Format. The new format will be integrated with The New York Times’ new NYT VR application for iOS, Android and Google’s platform for high quality, mobile VR known as Daydream. Mach1’s technology is part of a collaborative effort with The New York Times brought about by a strategic alliance with Secret Location and its cross-platform publishing and distribution platform VUSR, to bring the NYT VR content platform to iOS, Android and Daydream. Mach1TM’s playback technology will bring cinematic spatial sound to the NYT VR user experience.
Mach1’s suite of Spatial Audio Tools and VR Sound Format is billed as the first spatial audio creation and playback format created specifically for VR by audio professionals for audio professionals. Mach1 allows you to monitor record, playback, and produce true 3D sound recordings in Virtual Reality. Mach1’s spatial audio studio workflow is focused on preserving traditional postproduction audio processes and knowledge including mixing and mastering for VR. Mach1’s focus on traditional sound mixing techniques ensures that sound design studios utilizing Mach1’s tools can not only instantly make the move to VR and AR spatial audio creation within their existing workflow, but also create the cinematic and true to life sound critical for AR and VR content.
“For VR to be truly immersive, it needs convincing sound” said Mach1 CEO, Jacqueline Bošnjak. “Mach1’s approach enables the viewer to inhabit a persistent simulated universe where spatial audio consistency and quality control maintain that suspended disbelief.“
The VR audio created for the NYT VR platform will certainly not be the first created with the Mach1 format or with Mach1’s experienced sound designers. Mach1 sound designer and co-founder Dražen Bošnjak in conjunction with sister music studio Q Department have created music and sound for some of the industry’s most recent and highly acclaimed VR projects including The Martian VR Experience from 20TH Century Fox, Fox Innovation Lab, Mr. Robot Virtual Reality Experience with USA Network and Here be Dragons, Dear Angelica with Oculus Story Studio, The Mars VR Bus with Lockheed Martin, Take Flight with The New York Times as well as major collaborations with Ford Motors, Facebook, Infiniti, The Nature Conservancy and Apple Music.
Mach1’s sound designer and inventor Dražen Bošnjak has worked on Catatonic for Within and Saschka Unseld’s new VR film Dear Angelica which is in postproduction (it’s a follow up to his first one LOST that debuted with Oculus at Sundance). Dražen says he and his team developed Mach1’s because they simply could not find audio tools that allowed them to achieve the sound results they had come to expect from the film and television industry and translate those results to VR.
“We wanted to preserve the decades of real-world experience attained by sound engineers.” said Dražen. “We wanted the mix to be exactly what the end user experiences in the VR app enabling audio professionals and video editors to continue their craft in this new emerging medium.”
The fact that the Mach1’s spatial audio platform utilizes practices already familiar to audio engineers is an important product advantage. Additionally, Mach1’s tools allow sound designers to use a headset to experience the spatial nature of the audio in their studio exactly as the final user will experience it in the AR or VR app. “Mach1 allows audio engineers to fully control their spatial audio mix with the same guidelines they use in traditional mixing,” said Dražen. “It allows any professional music studio, sound designer or engineer in the world to mix for VR using traditional postproduction methods and techniques that have been established over half a century. That’s why we believe our platform will be widely adopted—because it gives any professional audio studio the keys to work in VR immediately.”
Jacqueline Bošnjak wants to make clear that this format is not just for tent-pole Hollywood VR projects. Immersion or “Presence” in virtual reality is a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. This perception is reliant on advanced spatial sound. “While Mach1 allows VR projects to achieve cinematic audio of sufficient quality to please even the most exacting Hollywood directors and producers, it is designed to be used on any VR project,” she said. “Mach1 exists to bring quality sound to VR and AR, the next great computing platform, and where better to start than The New York Times–who through VR is literally putting their readers in the story.
Films available in the Daydream app include these VR films with soundtrack by Q Department in association with Mach1:
The Creators: Rob Pruitt – T Magazine’s debut VR film by Luca Guadagnino, director of “I Am Love” and “A Bigger Splash,” focuses on the contemporary artist Rob Pruitt. It follows Pruitt on a day in his life — from a meditation at his Chinatown apartment to a visit to IKEA in Brooklyn, where he purchases 27 plush pandas (a signature in his artwork) and then back to paint in his Gowanus studio.
How I Became A Laughter Yoga Photographer – As part of The New York Times Magazine’s Voyages issue, follow fine art photographer Alec Soth on his voyage to Bangalore, India to make a portrait of laughter and happiness.
The NYT VR app has had more than 1 million downloads and is free to download in the Google Play and iOS App Stores.
Elston Promoted, Sustello Hired At Eleven
Melissa Elston, affectionately known by aliases such as Rosé and SW3 amongst others, is stepping up and into the role of executive producer at Santa Monica, Calif.-based audio post house Eleven. Succeeding Elston in her former producer’s role is CJ Sustello who comes over from Beacon Street Studios where she served as a producer.
Eleven was founded in 1999 by noted mixer Jeff Payne who heads a roster of audio talent.
South Lake Audio Re-Recording Mixers Rogers, Weber Reunite with EP Nolan On Westworld
The drama series Westworld, which just completed its first season on HBO, is described as a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin, exploring a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged. The contrast between (and sometimes intermingling of) the near future and the distant past fuels the drama and is a large part of the show’s fascinating appeal.
Westworld’s sound team plays a significant role in conjuring up its two divergent worlds. Re-recording mixers Keith Rogers and Scott Weber from South Lake Audio Services (which works out of Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, Calif.) were tasked with building soundtracks that include, on the one hand, steam locomotives, horses and gunfights, and, on the other, a vast industrial complex where engineers tinker with robots.
“That’s the joy of this show,” said producer Bruce Dunn, who supervises postproduction. “We are truly working on two completely different genres in each episode, a full bore Western and a clinical, futuristic tech world. It’s a lot of fun to play with that as it moves back and forth, or, especially, when the two meld together.”
Other key members of the show’s sound team include Emmy-winning supervising sound editor Tom de Gorter from Atomic Sound and composer Ramin Djawadi. The final mix was completed on Roundabout’s Stage F.
Rogers and Weber previously collaborated with Westworld co-creator and executive producer Jonathan Nolan on the series Person of Interest, and that familiarity helped them hit the ground running with Nolan and co-creator and executive producer Lisa Joy. “We’ve worked with Jonathan, Lisa, and their production team for more than five years and are in sync with their ideas and what they want to create in terms of a sonic image,” Rogers noted. “Jonathan’s priority is storytelling, and he loves to use sound to support what he is trying to get across in his stories.”
Citing the show’s length—most of the show’s ten episodes ran just under an hour—and the producers’ high expectations for quality, Rogers says the process of mixing Westworld is very demanding. But, he adds, they also have more time than most television dramas with a full five days to deliver each episode. “Because we have time we treat each episode like a feature,” he observes. “I pre-dub the dialogue, the ADR and the group elements before we add sound effects and music. That allows us to fine tune the elements. We are able to listen to each track, balance things and make sure they are correct. As we move forward, we balance the rest of the show around the dialogue.”
For the Old West scenes, de Gorter’s crew delivered a myriad of sound effects and sound design elements, many of which were originally recorded and derived from actual period sources. “There are authentic sounds of horses, wagons and guns,” notes Weber. “There are no cars, so the ambiance is birds and wind in the trees. In the bar, we have glass clinks and the crowds. It’s a lot of cool stuff.”
The soundscapes for the laboratory environments are not only far different, they require an imaginative touch in order to create a technological world, not of today, but of tomorrow. “The equipment needs to sound familiar but a little more advanced than what we have now,” explained Dunn. “How does a robot sound? The first episode features a broken down, 35 year-old robot. The sound team created sound treatments for an old robot’s eye blinks. They created tones for Tech World that vary from floor to floor, so Manufacturing sounds different from Behavior. There is a distinct sound for every place. If you listen to the mix closely, it’s all there.”
Rogers said they took pride in polishing the details. Many sounds play in the background and may go unnoticed, but are critical to creating a sense of place. “The subtleties are immense and it creates a lot of opportunities to experiment with sound,” he shared. “It’s a sound designer’s dream.”
Westworld’s blending of two worlds poses unique challenges in the mix, said Weber, but he credits the producers for providing them with the latitude to succeed. “It’s a privilege to work with people who devote the time and resources to sound to ensure it is done right and sounds right,” he said. “They provide a great creative environment and the freedom to do our best work.”
Westworld season one is available on HBO GO, HBO NOW and HBO ON DEMAND.
