We were pleased to have Professor John Merchant and Michael Bevers teach us about the history of immersive audio, how to start our exploration into it, and how it will potentially be evolving within audio.
He started off talking about how all inventions and advances in technology result in someone deciding that what we have is not good enough and that it could be better. We see that from mono to stereo to surround sound and finally at immersive audio.
To demonstrate that sound is the only truly immersive sense, he had a student stand up and proceeded to hold up a different number of fingers from different positions around the student. Of course, the student could see from the front, but when Professor Merchant moved behind the student, she was no longer able to see how many fingers he was holding up. However, when he snapped his fingers, no matter where he was, the student was able to determine how many times he snapped.
Professor Merchant showed us a quick run-through of recording with the Rode NT-SF1 and using the associated Rode plugins along with Facebook 360 plugins in order to create a second order ambisonic track. He also brought along his Vive for people to try out after the lecture.
We had a great turnout of Professors and students (undergraduates and graduates alike) with very engaging questions.
Some links to a video shown during the event and some websites he shared with us for further exploration have been shared below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X23hZNoSkUs
https://intothesoundfield.music.ox.ac.uk/
AES Inside Track Articles, specifically the ones on Spatial Audio
