AES Show 2024 NY

This workshop explores the unique challenges and opportunities in sound design and technical implementation for multi-participant extended reality (XR) experiences. Participants will learn techniques for creating immersive and interactive spatial audio to enhance presence and facilitate communication and collaboration in multi-participant XR environments. Through demonstrations and an expert-led panel discussion, attendees will gain insights into creating auditory experiences in XR.

Short Abstract:
This presentation explores Black, Indigenous, Afro-Asian, and Afro-Indigenous cross-cultural collaboration leading to influential innovations in sonic creative technology. Centering on the soundsystem as a form of self-determination and as a contemporary art form rooted in survival and resistance, the presentation aims to illuminate meaningful connections between ancestral and state-of-the-art sound technologies through the lens of critical decolonization theory. Highlighting innovations ranging from parametric EQ, radio, and the sound system as both cultural and analog technologies, the presentation shows how these could only exist through mutual influence and the building of nations and kinship across cultures bound by mutual experiences of oppression. These artistic traditions in music, gathering, and engineering emerged and continue to act as dynamic tools of survivance within Black and globally Indigenous communities. By skillfully using these tools, practitioners of these electronic and sonic art forms destabilize racialized boundaries and empower the collective ownership of cultural narratives—a fearless pursuit reflecting a shared vision of Black and Indigenous self-determination, liberation, and futurity for kin past, present, and future.

Extension:
The presentation’s audiovisual materials will comprise two aspects: archival materials from music and resistance movements in the featured locations and contemporary artworks dealing with identity politics and protest in connection with music. Featured locations will include, but are not limited to: Indian Country, USA & Canada; Kingston, Jamaica; Notting Hill, UK; and Detroit, MI. Timeline of technological innovation will center audio advancements in amplification and transmission within the post-transistor era (1947 - present), with a historical focus primarily from 1947 to 1996. Featured BIPOC artists and innovators in electrical engineering in the sonic arts will include and are not limited to: Hedley Jones, Tom Wong, and Don Lewis. Featured entrepreneurial artists in audio engineering, radio, recording, music and storytelling will include, but are not limited to: Vy Higgenson, Kemistry & Storm, Jeff Mills, K-Hand, and Patricia Chin. Featured Black, Asian and Indigenous owned radio stations and music labels that function as both mutual aid and community spaces will include, but are not limited to: Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, Cool Runnings Music, KTNN, VP Records, and the Sound System Futures Programme.

The objective of this session is to provide a brief overview mapping sound histories to the BIPOC innovators of origin with the aim of sparking generative discussion on Black and Indigenous creative technologies as both a cultural and computational history valuable and critical to the healing of community and dismantling of hegemonic societal structures. The session is structured largely in response to a critical lack of representation regarding BIPOC engineering history and legacy, and approaches this topic as a celebration of cross-cultural collaboration in a historical paradigm that often centers cross-cultural interactions as conflict-oriented. At the presentation’s conclusion participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own cross-cultural legacies as sources of innovation, as well as reflect on the unactivated dreams they may hold from their ancestors and how they might activate these dreams through sound, collective action, and community gathering.

3GPP, the worldwide partnership project among seven major regional telecommunications standard development organizations responsible for mobile communication standards, has recently completed the standardization of a new codec intended for Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) in 5G systems. The new IVAS codec is a feature of 3GPP Release 18 (5G-Advanced) and enables completely new service scenarios by providing capabilities for interactive stereo and immersive audio communications, content sharing and distribution. The addressed service scenarios include conversational voice with stereo and immersive telephony/conferencing, XR (VR/AR/MR) communications, i.e., XR telephony and conferencing, and live and non-live streaming of user-generated immersive and XR content.
The IVAS Codec is an extension of the 3GPP EVS codec. Beyond support for mono voice and audio content, IVAS also brings support for coding and rendering of stereo, multichannel-based audio, scene-based audio (Ambisonics), object-based audio and metadata-assisted spatial audio – a new parametric audio format designed for direct spatial audio pick-up from smartphones. The performance of the codec was evaluated in the course of the 3GPP standardization in 23 experiments carried out by two independent laboratories each.
The workshop will introduce the IVAS Codec starting with a brief overview of standardization process and state of the art. The codec architecture, supported audio formats, and main technology blocks behind the supported coding and rendering options will be presented and discussed in detail together with test results and capabilities of the new codec in terms of compression efficiency and audio quality. In addition, the panelists will discuss new service scenarios for immersive audio communication and other mobile use-cases. If possible, immersive audio demonstrations will be carried out during the workshop. The panelists will collect and address questions and other input from the audience.

This presentation provides an insightful overview of statistical acoustic calculation techniques and geometrical acoustic modeling. It addresses the unique challenges associated with small to medium-sized spaces and delves into the intricacies of contemporary ray tracing software tools. Attendees will also learn about the latest advancements of using these tools in immersive audio environments. Additionally, the presentation will showcase comparative low-frequency analysis calculations obtained using a variety of tools, including boundary element methods (BEM), finite element
methods (FEM) and others. The session includes a series of real-world case studies to illustrate these concepts in practical applications.

With upwards of fifty remotes each year, NY Public Radio broadcasts a great variety of events from the very simple to large scale events that can involve a many different challenges, including connectivity issues and internet issues with getting audio back to the studios for live broadcasts, dealing with microphone techniques for the greatest orchestras in the world at Carnegie Hall to dealing with the elements with live broadcasts in Central Park or other outdoor locations around NYC, dealing with cooperating with p.a.'s and unions at various sites, to broadcasts at a politician's residence. Each of these kinds of events might entail unique technical and personnel challenges, but there's also a lot of common sense approaches to working with each of these challenges, as well as applying new technologies as they come along to simplify things, and hopefully make things easier over the years to deal with these challenges.

We will discuss in detail two recent events, "This Land" a live broadcast of Classical, jazz, and Americana from Brooklyn Bridge Park and World Orchestra Week (WOW!) a Youth orchestra festival from Carnegie Hall, contrasting indoor vs outdoor and amplified vs unamplified.

Some engineers and producers take advantage of a few of the customizations and optimizations of their machines (laptops, desktops, mobile recorders, tablets, etc.) However, unlocking the deeper settings of your production machine can lead to greater efficiency and productivity with cutting-edge applications and technologies. QuestionATL will take attendees through a variety of production optimizations–including mobile devices when working remotely with artists who need to provide high-resolution content without having access to a studio or professional-grade gear.

Anthony Agnello and Richard Factor have over 100 combined years as members of the AES. They have been fortunate to witness and, in some cases, perpetrate the evolution of audio engineering from electro-mechanical to digital. In May of 1979, they published an article in db Magazine, “Doohickii Digitali”, that concluded:

"… we have summarized some of the possibilities of digital signal processing (and completely ignored digital recording, a probably more important subject).  While we don’t have the “all digital” studio yet, it can be reasonably foreseen that before too long, all the components will be available to make one, so that the only analog elements remaining will be the microphone and speaker.  Since these are the primary limitations of the recording process at present, we anxiously await the development of a standard digital I/O bus for the human element."


In this lecture, they will pick up not only where they left off, but also before they began.