What is Dolby Atmos / Spatial Audio?

0:01 What's up everybody, it's Scoobert Doobert here.So I've talked a lot about the future of music, and the techniques of music, and I've

0:23 hinted at both of those things coming together in Dolby Atmos spatial audio, but I've onlytalked briefly about it in this podcast, I'm gonna break it down, because I am almostfinished with my certification course, and that'll allow me to do remixes of Dolby Atmos

0:49 style things for this spatial audio concept for major labels and stuff like that, becausethey'll be able to see, hey, this person's certified by Dolby and knows what he's doing.So what is it exactly?I'm gonna go completely off the cuff, so this is like speed round, how much did I actuallyretain from my certification course.

1:11 All right, spatial audio is a re-conceptualization of how to pan music, and you're probablyfamiliar in movie theaters of surround sound.It's taking that surround sound concept, and taking it to the extreme.So with surround sound, like a home theater, maybe you have five speakers, but with DolbyAtmos, you don't really have to think about speakers as much anymore.You think of a box.

1:44 So you put the listener inside of this box, and then you can fly instruments around theirhead, because Atmos is basically like a software way of thinking about panning, and thenthey have tools to take that like perfect level, and then basically dumb it all the way

2:08 down to like a sound bar or your phone, or you know, AirPods or whatever, but it allowsyou to have that full fidelity, that full range of fidelity from a box that's literallyjust a giant speaker, like make sure that you're just suspended in a giant speaker, andyou can have stuff fly over your head and behind you, into the sides of you and in frontof behind you, all around.

2:33 And then it like using that same file, it can go anywhere from that perfect upwards compatibledirection, all the way down to the downwards compatible direction, where it's just in yourheadphones.That's what's really cool about it, is that you don't really have to be thinking in theway that you used to for surround sound.Like I'm going to put this over in this speaker, and then I'm going to move this over to that

2:56 speaker.You instead think about three dimensional space.And then the algorithms and stuff will apply it to whatever amount of speakers you have.And ideally, you know, you have 7.1.2 or 9.1.2, and you probably hear these numbers.Like what are these points?What are that?What does that convey?So like say 7.1.2, you have seven speakers around you, a subwoofer and then two speakersabove you.

3:22 And the concept of Atmos, even though it's not completely perfect in reality, is thatyou can, you know, add as many speakers as you want.And then this should be able to upwards compatible forever.So the idea is like, you'll never have to do this again.This is the surround sound remix forever, where before it was like, oh, now we have to do

3:46 a 7.1 mix, after we did a 5.1 mix, and now we got to do a 9.1 mix, and now we got todo a 9.1.2 mix.It just kind of like eliminates all of that.But I think it, from my perspective, really does is it liberates creativity, and it allowsyou to think in a much more naturalistic way, rather than saying left speaker has guitar.You can think like, okay, the guitar is going to start behind you and then emerge into

4:10 the left speaker.And that's pretty cool, or the hi-hat is going to be above you up in this like top region,but then the kick drum and stuff is going to like always be grounded in the subwoofer,and then the snare is going to move around as different digital effects, hit it.That kind of conceptualization.So there's another interesting part of this, and you'll sense a theme across my otherpodcast.

4:38 I really like the naturalistic stuff and the way that influences music.And so like a really good example of how that's happening is there's a lot more found sounds or Foley or natural ambience being added into music, which I think is dope.And that is a awesome trend that's going on right now, and I hope that it doesn't justlike fizzle out as a trend.

4:59 I hope it's something that is here to stay because the sounds of nature, the sounds of justsound in general, these tone poems, is really fascinating and really satisfying, I think,as a listener.Because then it's like, it's contextualizing crickets or something like that.You know, it's adding a layer of dimension that is just from nature, and I think it'sreally cool.

5:23 Learning from nature helps us with panning in Dolby Atmos.And so things that are like higher frequencies, we literally, we call them higher, and a lotof times we'll look up when we say like, oh yeah, high frequency.And that actually can like influence where we place things in our mix.One of the things that they talked about in this course, I don't think this was

5:45 an official Dolby thing, it was like an engineer's thing, which is Derek Ali, MixedByAli,he's the guy that mixed all the Kendrick Lamar stuff up to this most recent record, muchof other amazing records as well.He and his team are how I'm doing this certification.And they mentioned, yeah, things above 2000 kilohertz do really well on those upper speakers.

6:12 Learning low kind of sounds in the upper speakers is a little disorienting, disorientingcan be good, but it's good to have like kind of a frame of reference of, oh, okay, yeah,I can put like the higher synths up there, the sparkly stuff, the stuff that feels likeit's rain, you know, that's a good place to put that.And then one of the other like fun things that they're developing is plugins within DolbyAtmos.

6:38 And plugins are those little bits of software that just like an EQ or compression, you canthrow into a track and manipulate the signal and the processing of those ones and zerosto augment or change them in some way.One of the most exciting things obviously with having a perfectly 360 rotation is beingable to deal with panning.

7:02 So having a sound fly over your head and then back under your ear and then around to theother ear, you know, that's kind of cool stuff, like literally like a fly.Very immersive.Hence the name like spatial audio immersive audio.I'm like excited about that, but not as excited as I think some people are panning as fun,but it's not like the bread and butter, that's like a little spice.

7:28 That's like the sprinkles, you know, that's fun.It's cool to have like new sprinkles, but it's not like as ground-breaking foundationalas some of the other things that are going on, such as the LFE send, which is just sendingdirectly to the subwoofer and being able to control how much and what you're sendingto the subwoofer, that's really cool dealing with low end, that's awesome.

7:52 And then also being able to put things into virtual spaces and using spatial audio reverbs,that's what I'm most excited about.Like being able to like say you're in a perfect listening environment room that doesn't haveany sounds that are like reverbs and decays and slapbacks, it doesn't have any of thatkind of stuff.It's just neutral.

8:15 Now, I can put you in whatever room I want you to, and because it's all around you,it's going to actually feel like you're in that room, and how cool is that?Like to be able to snap between a massive concert hall to an intimate room, betweena section, like talk about scale.That's something I can really mess with.So panning school, but typically that's going to be special effects.

8:45 The guitars and stuff, they're going to kind of be where they are, most of the time.They'll get wider, they'll get narrower, they'll do some small stuff, but more or less,the guitar is on stage, and the guitar stands in the same-ish place on stage, and that'sit.The cool thing is, being able to say that you're on stage with your favorite band, becausethat's one of the things that Dolby Atmos is trying to pitch.

9:10 Yeah, I've got mixed feelings about that.Sometimes I don't want to be on stage.Sometimes I have a lot of you looking at the stage, but anyway, say that you're on stageand the whole band is surrounding you and performing.To be able to snap between different quasi-real world environments in an instant is goingto feel so otherworldly.It's something that no one's fully experienced.

9:34 We've done this in stereo, and it still is striking.I think one of the things that defines post-1970, mid-70s, when they start to developreverbs, I guess there were plate reverbs and stuff like that, back in the 50s, theyhad the chamber rooms that could be a whole pot on all the different types of reverbs.There have been a bunch of different ways.