During the process of rendering audio stems, to visualise and observe the frequency response of various VAS models and placements of HRTF listener / sound sources, impulse responses have been rendered through for this purpose. Observing the frequency responses against one another will draw an insightful distinction between VAS models and their intrinsic timbre similarly to natural acoustic environments.

As a core part of the generation of virtual acoustics comes from the geometric structure the sound sources propagate within, this session will run iterations on three models with varying size to determine what distinctions may be apparent between their VAS.

Within the concept of VA there is the function to define material properties of rendered environment geometry. This is done via Steam Audio’s geometry tag component, which can assign properties of absorption / scattering / transmission to surfaces to adjust how incoming rays from sound sources interact with surfaces.

As a key aspect of this type of surround encoded audio is that it is done with only 2-channel PCM waveforms, this testing session will investigate whether this is digital dependent or whether it is compatible and able to be reproduced over analogue stereo tape. The purpose of this is to understand whether the encoded audio on reproduction should be consistent regardless of 2-channel playback medium, to understand whether playback speed has any effect to the encoded audio’s spatial properties, as well as to demonstrate that the spatial and binaural cue properties are fundamental to the waveform with no additional decoding / processing / playback setup requirements.

The following VAS model rooms have been created to generate varying audio rendering environments which the signal stems can propagate, encoding them with the virtual acoustic properties of each. These examples use different stems for each source, and vary in VAS sizes to investigate the breadth of variety which could be possible with this encoding process.

Within the following pages is the iterative session documentation that has been produced alongside the primary practice-based research inquiry into practical and creative application of the encoding method itself. The iterative process has spanned across both development and optimization of the rendering process and encoding functionality, as well as the structure and approach to the sessions themselves.

In our first week of the module we were tasked to produce an asset pack for a film, this consisted of ADR recordings, sound design packs, foley backgrounds, walla / loop groups, and music for four scenes. Working as a production team we divided the assets up, meaning I was responsible for producing the alternatives for foley backgrounds and sound design. The ADR was then scheduled to be recorded in the Neve / Audient studios along with the loop group assets.

For my game audio project for this module we were tasked with creating an accompaniment piece to implement into the game environment using FMOD middleware and Unreal 4 game engine. For this I used Logic Pro to create the audio files I would need, the sounds which I produced for the backing ambience I found were focused primarily to create the overall atmosphere to the piece.