AES Paris 2016
Monday, June 6, 18:00 — 19:00 (Room 351)
Audio Projections 12—Contemporary Music in 3D Audio
Presenter:Hugo Romano Guimarães, N - Barcelona, Spain; Neu Records - Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
N is a production company based in Barcelona devoted to surround and 3D audio recordings in natural acoustics. We specialize in the recording and reproduction of classical and contemporary music in immersive audio formats, with a realistic aesthetic approach.
The way we “see” sound is inspired by the soundscape of natural acoustics, with its immersive perspective, richness of timbres and colossal dynamic contrasts. When the perception of these aspects are carefully taken into account in doing an immersive recording and the right techniques are used, the result is a natural and realistic sound reproduction that creates the illusion of being there.
We want people to hear what they couldn’t experience in a live performance and we do that by transporting them to a privileged place in the center of the event: a place where you are truly immersed in the musical experience.
This privileged situation is not a naturalistic recreation of a musical event: it’s rather a hyperrealistic sound illusion of a musical event, created by the manipulation of several factors:
• Our microphone array design, which combines an association of different distances, angles and polar patterns in such a way that it produces not only a good sense of localization, but also an extremely natural timbre, and a sensation of space that music needs in order to expand and breathe;
• The selection of venues with voluminous spaces we choose for our projects, where sound can develop freely with unfettered dynamics, free of physical compression, and where we can find the perfect balance between direct and reverberant sound in a real context;
• And an artistic direction in close collaboration with the composers, which allows them to write music considering all these possibilities and creating new ways of experiencing music.
We present the albums of our label Neu Records in 3D sound installations, a diffusion format that allows the creation of an immersive listening context and gives a compelling social dimension to our projects. Our productions go beyond mere recordings, becoming a hybrid between sound art exhibitions and live concerts. At the same time, the physical format of the albums has also changed. The booklets become books with download codes, facilitating the reading of the texts we edit, and it’s only a matter of time before physical CDs are no longer produced.
