Towards Best Practices in Spatial Audio Post Production: A Case Study of Brazilian Popular Music
José Ricardo Barboza, Eduardo Magalhães, Gilberto Bernardes · 2021 Immersive and 3D Audio: from Architecture to Automotive (I3DA) · 2021
Since the beginning of the XXI century, we have been witnessing a significant shift in the media landscape towards enhanced immersive audiovisual manifestations, from controlled research environments to gradual production market penetration. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality, 360circvideo, and digital games are representative examples of these immersive technologies. Spatial audio design and production are instrumental to the immersive experience. As Ambisonics techniques do potentially mean more expense – in memory, processing power, and production budget –, limited exploration in the development of new composition and production methodologies across popular music production has been considered beyond the traditional stereophonic format. Our work details a postproduction case study using spatial audio, namely High Order Ambisonics. The case study is a Brazilian popular song, remixed using 3rd order Ambisonics from a multitrack recording session composed of monophonic and stereophonic audio tracks. The song encompasses a unique approach for audio spatialization guided by hierarchical audio content attributes across multiple structural time scales and musical contexts. The evaluation of our production process adopted iterative heuristic assessments comparing technical decisions and aesthetic intentions in fostering an augmented spatial audio song. A set of technical guidelines and good practices on how and why to positioning audio in space are abstracted from our case study evaluation, which critically advances the theory and practice of popular musical audio production in immersive technologies.