Alongside working on trial productions and tools, we also continue to research the technical elements and creative practice of audio device orchestration, particularly in collaboration with our academic partners. Research applications and technical elements of audio orchestration. There’s much more information about how it works in the Audio Orchestrator user guide. We’ve developed a production tool called Audio Orchestrator that is available to the community for prototyping orchestrated audio experiences.
To experiment with different types of content, we needed to come up with a way of rapidly prototyping ideas. The Vostok-K Incident took a team of people much longer to make than a standard radio drama. We ran co-creation workshops with young audience members and production teams, and we’re working on various new trial productions.Įnable wide-scale prototyping of orchestrated experiences. We’ve released a trial audio drama, which went down well - the next step is to explore in more depth the potential uses for audio orchestration technology. Investigate the value of and use cases for audio device orchestration. We’ve got a way to go before that though, and in the medium term, we have three objectives. This is often difficult to achieve in real home settings, so making use of everyday devices that listeners already have access to has great potential for bringing immersive experiences to a wider audience.Įventually, our vision is that content producers inside and outside of the BBC can easily take advantage of orchestrated audio reproduction. Historically, immersive audio technologies have required a set of identical loudspeakers in carefully controlled positions (or the use of headphones - see our work on binaural audio). So adding spatial audio to media experiences is a great way to make them more immersive and engaging. In everyday life, we can hear sounds coming from all around us - spatial hearing is one of the ways we make sense of the world. Since then, we’ve been working on understanding more about how this technology might be used in BBC productions and building production tools that make it easy to create orchestrated experiences. Listeners could connect their phones, tablets, and laptops to hear immersive sound and unlock extra content.
In 2018, we demonstrated this technology with a short audio drama, The Vostok-K Incident. An orchestrated audio system needs to enable devices to connect to each other, play back sound in sync, and select which parts of the audio scene to play back. The available devices might well all be very different - for example, a TV, a smart speaker, and a mobile phone. Using everyday devices for sound reproduction offers the potential for unlocking immersive experiences for a large number of listeners, but comes with significant challenges. But more recently, the Audio Team has seen how we can use this technology to deliver immersive and interactive audio experiences. BBC Research & Development has been investigating this in different ways for a while (for example, looking at second screen applications). Device orchestration is the concept of using a set of connected and synchronised devices for the reproduction of a media experience.