Music Recording for Virtual Reality

Chair:
Gavin Kearney, University of York - York, UK

Presenters:
Hyunkook Lee, University of Huddersfield - Huddersfield, UK
Hashim Riaz, University of York - York, Yorkshire, UK
Mirek Stiles, Abbey Road Studios - London, UK

There is a growing market for innovative ways to appreciate and listen to music through new Virtual Reality (VR) experiences made accessible through smartphones and VR headsets. However, production workflows for creating immersive musical experiences over VR are still in their infancy. This workshop explores the effectiveness of different microphone configurations and recording techniques in a higher-order Ambisonic processing framework to deliver an engaging and hyper-real interactive VR music experience, with and without immersive 360 visuals. In particular, it will look at how traditional recording workflows can be adapted to immersive 360. Test material will be demonstrated of a live popular music recordings undertaken at Abbey Road with traditional music recording techniques such as spot and stereo microphone setups and advanced techniques using dedicated VR multichannel microphone arrays.