TY - JOUR
T1 - Practitioners' Perspectives on Spatial Audio
T2 - Insights into Dolby Atmos and Binaural Mixes in Popular Music
AU - Dewey, Christopher
AU - Moore, Austin
AU - Lee, Hyunkook
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Audio Engineering Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2024/7/9
Y1 - 2024/7/9
N2 - This paper presents the practitioners’ perspective on mixing popular music in spatial audio, particularly Dolby Atmos and the binaural mixes generated by the Dolby and Apple renderers. It presents the results of a dual-stage study, which utilized focus groups with eight professional music producers and a questionnaire completed by 140 practitioners. Analysis revealed the continued influence of stereo approaches on mix engineers, partly due to its historical dominance as a production platform and consumers’ continued use of headphones. It was also found that core elements of popular music productions, such as snare drums, tom-tom drums, kick drums, bass guitars, main guitars, and vocals, were less likely to have binaural processing applied compared with other sources. It was also shown there were perceived differences in the suitability of spatial audio mixing for specific genres, with electronic dance music, jazz, pop, classical, and world music rated as the most suitable. Regarding the binaural renderers, there was less user satisfaction with the Apple device compared with Dolby’s, and this dissatisfaction manifested mainly in the need for more user control. Finally, mix engineers were very aware of the importance of their mixes translating to smaller speaker systems and headphone playback, in particular.
AB - This paper presents the practitioners’ perspective on mixing popular music in spatial audio, particularly Dolby Atmos and the binaural mixes generated by the Dolby and Apple renderers. It presents the results of a dual-stage study, which utilized focus groups with eight professional music producers and a questionnaire completed by 140 practitioners. Analysis revealed the continued influence of stereo approaches on mix engineers, partly due to its historical dominance as a production platform and consumers’ continued use of headphones. It was also found that core elements of popular music productions, such as snare drums, tom-tom drums, kick drums, bass guitars, main guitars, and vocals, were less likely to have binaural processing applied compared with other sources. It was also shown there were perceived differences in the suitability of spatial audio mixing for specific genres, with electronic dance music, jazz, pop, classical, and world music rated as the most suitable. Regarding the binaural renderers, there was less user satisfaction with the Apple device compared with Dolby’s, and this dissatisfaction manifested mainly in the need for more user control. Finally, mix engineers were very aware of the importance of their mixes translating to smaller speaker systems and headphone playback, in particular.
KW - Spacial audio
KW - Dolby Atmos
KW - Popular music
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85201971178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
VL - 72
SP - 504
EP - 516
JO - AES: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
JF - AES: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
SN - 0004-7554
IS - 7/8
M1 - 22647
ER -