Recent developments in spatial audio — old and new albums mixed together for immersive formats — have made news in the pop world.
Due to the correct production process (in the studio) and tech setup (at home), headphone sounds no longer need to be felt statically pressed into each ear; instead, they may seem to be spinning in your head or sobbing from the nape of your neck.
Or just breathe again. Whether you focus on a stray slide-guitar accent in Taylor Swift’s Dolby Atmos mix “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” or appreciating the jagged details of brass-arrangement filigree in Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, three-dimensional feel of large-speaker arrays to your ears.
But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or four-channel output — in the 1970s. More recently, binaural recordings and mixes, designed to mimic the 3-D feel, have become a treat. Now, however, these and other spatial production skills are enjoying deeper investment by the company, including head-tracking technology as a feature of Apple’s latest Beats headphones. (When you move your head while wearing them — with the tracking option enabled — the sound-points seem to stay fixed in your 360-degree field, even if you veer.)
Head tracking seemed pointless to me – even distracting – until I tried it on the new archival recording “Evenings at the Village Gate,” featuring John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.
Hearing Dolphy’s bass clarinet in front of my face — so steady, even as I shook my head in wonder at his playing — gave me the fleeting sensation that I was sharing space with legend. A neat trick, though not one that’s more valuable than Dolphy or Coltrane playing on its own terms.
By the time the recording was made, classical composers were bringing spatialized concepts into their creative practice. Long before the relatively tame technology of two-channel stereo sound became standard in every home, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were using more complex mixes for works involving electronics or taped elements.
There is a reason why Stockhausen is one of the culturally appropriate on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”: The composer’s works, such as “Gesang der Jünglinge,” from 1956, used a five-speaker mix (with one on the ceiling). That made a lasting impression on Paul McCartney, who once described “Gesang” as his favorite Stockhausen’s “plick-plop” piece.
Today, more traditional corners of the classical music world are making inroads into spatial audio as well.
The orchestral world’s leading conductors — including Riccardo Muti and Esa-Pekka Salonen — have personally approved spatial audio mixes of their recent recordings, released on Apple Music and its stand-alone classical streaming app. And, like other genres, Apple has assembled playlists of spatialized remixes.
Meanwhile, regular players in the immersive classical music cohort went about their business: Members of SWR Experimentalstudio arrived at the Time Spans Festival in New York this month, bringing surround-sound works by the Italian modernist Luigi Nono. And American composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton brought a new surround-sound concept, “Thunder Music,” to the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany.
Those live performances were great. It’s a different story with recordings: After listening to various Dolby Atmos mixes recently, I feel that the more mainstream record of spatial offerings of classical music remains a work in progress.
Somewhere in between is Sonic Sphere, a realization of a spatial audio concept by Stockhausen, at the Shed in New York this summer. Its 124-speaker setup surrounds around 200 listeners at once. In early July, I heard a new mix of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” that suffered from muddy bass frequencies. This, unfortunately, also robbed the work of its chiseled, Minimalist grace; instead of following the bass clarinet lines, just guess they’re there. A sense of drama is lost.
Similarly, some selections you’ll find in Apple Music’s “Classical in Spatial Audio” playlists seem poorly chosen for the format. A recording of a deep solo work like Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” doesn’t exactly cry out for spatial treatment. But when it gets one — like on a lovely Fazil Say recording — its reverb levels seem jacked into the sky. It’s more disruptive than moving. Such extraneous mixes are also a poor advertisement for what Dolby Atmos can provide when applied to the right repertoire.
For a contrast, check out the opening work on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recent album “Contemporary American Composers,” Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.” That track is very inviting in its regular stereo mix; even as its singsong opening motif is passed between sections, taking on new timbral hues, it never loses its open-hearted sense of invitation. With the Dolby Atmos mix in Apple Music, that effect goes deeper. The gaps in bowed strings, brasses and percussion are wider. A central mixed pizzicato line takes on a more dramatic, bridging role.
The orchestra’s audio engineer, Charlie Post, said in an interview that “contemporary music seems better for it.” And he recounts how, since joining the Chicago Symphony in 2014, he has been “future-proofing” sessions by recording with more microphones than strictly required for radio broadcast or recording purposes. archival. Now, with a format like Dolby Atmos, the ensemble is ready with a powerful audio-capture program — think of it as a very detailed orchestral data set — from every performance.
After working with producer David Frost and spatial-mixing expert Silas Brown, Post needed to get the sign-off from Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony. The Post recalled that when the conductor, wearing Sennheiser headphones, heard the binaural rendering of the 2018 album “Italian Masterworks,” he considered himself impressed — and gave the ensemble’s spatial-audio team his blessing to create more in this field.
“He thought it was more extensive and pleasing to him,” Post said. “So that’s a great thumbs-up to get.”
With the San Francisco Symphony, Salonen has been equally enthusiastic — and more hands on — with the engineers as he plans upcoming performances and releases.
“We have a very, very good team, so they don’t need any kind of mother,” he said in a video interview. “But I’m just fascinated by the process itself, because it’s a new kind of mixing. When you place objects with sound in 360 space, it becomes like a fun computer game — very entertaining. And there are some musical artistic gains that are not gimmicks. It doesn’t have to be technology for technology’s sake; may have an expressive purpose.”
That’s clear in Salonen’s recent recordings of Gyorgy Ligeti’s San Francisco music, some of which now exist as Dolby Atmos-enabled singles. (Ligeti’s take on “Lux Aeterna,” famously used by Stanley Kubrick in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is also available on YouTube in a binaural, headphone-optimized version.)
In Ligeti’s “Ramifications” — a piece that required different groups of the orchestra to play in different tunings — the Dolby Atmos mix brought out strange differences. The haunting and branching strings are easier to find and appreciate, smeared across a wide soundstage; the peak of the chatter has a fresh force.
Salonen, who has been interested in mixing technology with the traditional orchestra, both as a conductor and as a composer, thought about which Dolby Atmos recordings he would like to see. Thinking about Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” he said, “I’ll buy that!”
In an email, Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s longtime associate and collaborator, said there are no plans to remix the Stockhausen Verlag catalog. The market, he added, is currently very small.
Apple’s market share could change that. But nowadays, there are other distributors of cutting-edge spatial audio compositions.
Composer Natasha Barrett’s recent album “Leap Seconds” — perhaps the most vivid spatial-audio work I’ve experienced in the last decade — comes with a headphones-only binaural mix upon purchase. from the Sargasso label. And the British label All Dust is releasing a binaural mix of albums on its Bandcamp page.
This year, the best spatial audio purchase I made was a All That Dust download of Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” for piano, percussion and electronic sounds. That may not be as newsworthy as the latest buzzy technology, but it’s not as expensive either.
The week I visited the Shed, tickets for Reich’s show started at $46, for a concert that spanned an hour-long playback session. But my “Kontakte” recording was something of a correction: only 5 pounds ($6.37). With that binaural release and others like it, you don’t have to rush into hyped gear from Apple. Anyone with solid over-ear headphones — such as the Sennheiser line Muti used in Chicago — can experience this magic.
