Using binaural audio means dealing with HRTFs. In the HRTF section in the Spat Revolution preferences menu, you can access and manage HRTFs. The HRTF used by default is Kemar, which can of course be changed and another HRTF can be set up as default instead.

In the Manage HRTF section you have access to a database listing locally available and downloadable HRTFs. When an HRTF is downloaded, or locally available on your computer, you can set up, with Include or Exclude, which HRTFs are displayed as available in the Spat Revolution Binaural Room or Binaural Monitoring modules.

As an example, the KU100 Neumann HRTF, commonly used in 360/VR pipelines and in VR SDKs (Google, YouTube, etc.), is available in the database and can be downloaded and included in your workflow.

Choosing the KU100 Neumann as the default HRTF will assure it is selected automatically every time you use a Binaural Room or Binaural Monitor module.

If you are fortunate enough to have your own HRTF, you can simply import your file to Spat Revolution in a few simple steps. First, verify that your HRTF is using a SOFA file format and that it’s Diffuse Field Equalized – this means that the direction-independent component in the HRTF is removed. This direction-dependent component is referred to as a DTF (Direct Transfer Function) version. Supported are SimpleFreeFieldHRIR or SimpleFreeFieldSOS IIR.  HRTF Modeled as IIR filters are preferred.

Ideally, your file name ends with SampleRate.SOFA. With this file name structure, Spat Revolution will import all your HRTFs as one single entity, with various sample rates available. (Without this file name structure, each sample rate will be imported as a separate HRTF, which is not as convenient. File example “My HRTF name”_44100.sofa “My HRTF name”_48000.sofa :My HRTF name”_96000.sofa)

Importing your HRTF to Spat Revolution will require four simple steps:

1. Locate your files and open Spat Revolution.

2. Go to Preferences, HRTF section, Manage HRTFs.

3. Press the import button and select your .SOFA files (You can select all sample rates).

4. Make sure to choose the DTF version of your HRTF.

Success!

When your HRTFs are imported, you will see them as available files, which from now on will automatically be included in your Spat Revolution software preferences. Your last step is to simply choose your HRTF as the default in the HRTF section in the Spat Revolution preferences.

Using the generic Kemar HRTF provided as a default for binaural in Spat Revolution, or downloading any of the popular HRTFs used in 360/VR pipelines such as the Neumann KU 100, is where binaural starts. Achieving a more accurate and reliable monitoring experience, with a far more natural sense of space and direction, can be achieved with your own individual HRTF.

Unfortunately, a personalized HRTF is not easy to come by. Some laboratories do offer them, but the expense makes them largely impractical for most engineers. 

Rest assured, the Genelec Aural ID and a simple import of your HRTF file into FLUX: IRCAM Spat Revolution will have you covered here.

Some background. Our head, outer ear shapes, and head movements provide us with a wonderful ability to localize sound sources, which is why monitoring over loudspeakers works so effectively. Headphones, however, break the link to these natural mechanisms we have acquired over our lifetime, making it harder to localize sounds, since sounds from headphones seem to reside ‘inside’ our heads rather than all around us.

The Aural ID computes how your head, external ear, and upper body affect and color audio arriving from any given direction. This effect is called Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF), and is unique to each user. The Aural ID calculates your individual HRTF by modeling your personal head and upper torso features, and creates a file that can be integrated into your Spat Revolution audio workstation. All thanks to the SOFA file format supported by Genelec and FLUX:: IRCAM.

For more information on managing and importing HRTFs read the Managing and Importing HRTF article.

Using the generic Kemar HRTF provided as a default for binaural in Spat Revolution, or downloading any of the popular HRTFs used in 360/VR pipelines such as the Neumann KU 100, is where binaural starts. Achieving a more accurate and reliable monitoring experience, with a far more natural sense of space and direction, can be achieved with your own individual HRTF.

Unfortunately, a personalized HRTF is not easy to come by. Some laboratories do offer them, but the expense makes them largely impractical for most engineers. 

Rest assured, the Genelec Aural ID and a simple import of your HRTF file into FLUX: IRCAM Spat Revolution will have you covered here.

Some background. Our head, outer ear shapes, and head movements provide us with a wonderful ability to localize sound sources, which is why monitoring over loudspeakers works so effectively. Headphones, however, break the link to these natural mechanisms we have acquired over our lifetime, making it harder to localize sounds, since sounds from headphones seem to reside ‘inside’ our heads rather than all around us.

The Aural ID computes how your head, external ear, and upper body affect and color audio arriving from any given direction. This effect is called Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF), and is unique to each user. The Aural ID calculates your individual HRTF by modeling your personal head and upper torso features, and creates a file that can be integrated into your Spat Revolution audio workstation. All thanks to the SOFA file format supported by Genelec and FLUX:: IRCAM.

Want to know more about Aural ID?

Go to Acquiring and Importing your Genelec Aural ID to Spat Revolution

Berlin, Germany—April 2020…

Given his background mixing front-of-house for rock bands, it’s no surprise that when Sphereo sound designer and 3D audio operator Jonas Gehrmann discusses immersive audio, he focuses a lot on music use cases. “In the end, immersive audio for concerts should be about music and not about technology,” he insists. “If you make an immersive concert mix where stuff is flying around, after two minutes it’s boring. We might use FLUX:: Immersive’s SPAT Revolution to create a more 360 degree image of the stage from the viewers position, so you are standing next to the guitar player and you hear the drums and guitar from there. We can use it to create a space for the in-ear monitors, where you usually wouldn’t hear the onstage sound. We create an immersive experience on the stage, but it’s still within the music; it’s not a rollercoaster ride.”

Gehrmann uses SPAT Revolution to create immersive environments in a variety of venues, ranging from concert and theater venues such as Berlin’s historic Friedrichstadt-Palast theater, where he is a member of the sound designers’ team, to planetariums and other settings. “When you’re providing an immersive experience, every sound has to reach every point in the audience,” he observes. “When you do that with regular level panning, if you make it loud enough to hear in some places, it’s much too loud in other places. With SPAT, it’s possible to do an immersive experience where the mix is very accurate everywhere in the theater. We use SPAT to give the audience a natural sound; the people should think there’s nothing on the PA. What I do and what Fabian [Gehrmann’s Sphereo partner, room acoustic engineer Fabian Knauber] does has to be about music and to involve natural hearing.”

Another advantage of SPAT is that it’s scalable and can be used in venues of varying sizes and with different loudspeaker systems. “For the immersive planetarium shows I did with pianist Kai Schumacher, we did 15 shows at 6 different planetariums over a couple of years,” Gehrmann recalls. “Every planetarium was different. Sometimes the people just sat in rows or in a circle because the stage is the dome. Schumacher is playing the piano live, and the sound goes to speakers in the roof. We had a 12-, a 16-, and a 24-speaker setup that we carried around to cover the various planetariums and other venues. With SPAT, we were able to provide a great sounding immersive experience in all of them.”

That’s not to say it’s always easy adapting to different speaker systems. “Each type of loudspeaker gives you different results because of the loudspeaker’s design, so you have to account for that,” notes Gehrmann. “Compression, distortion, and phase issues can affect your results. Older halls where you have a a combination of different types of speakers can be especially challenging. We’ve worked in spaces where the differences between speakers weren’t correct for the room, some speakers were an odd shape, and we had totally weird problems. But SPAT makes those issues much easier to deal with than other immersive systems.”

To date, all of Gehrmann’s projects have been for stationary audiences but he is eager to try new things. “I want to do an installation with SPAT where people can move around,” he muses. “One of our ideas is to put audio on headphones for people in an audience and track their positions as they move around. The sound will change along with their position.”

SPAT is a professional tool, Gehrmann emphasizes, and to get the best results, you need to understand what you’re doing. “It’s not a trial-and-error tool for people who aren’t willing to learn how it works,” he asserts. “You have to know about room acoustics and which features will do what you want. But once you learn how to use it, it’s a powerful creative tool. SPAT gives you ideas and inspiration for new things you can try because it can do so much. It’s a big playground. And if you suggest a good idea to the people at FLUX:: Immersive, they will implement it, so you can directly influence the product. That’s very different from other companies.”

The easiest and fastest way to get started with SPAT Revolution in a DAW environment is by using the Local Audio Path mode, running SPAT Revolution on the same workstation as the DAW.

To facilitate this and to get started easily, we have created sessions and templates for a variety of DAWs and SPAT Revolution.

Steinberg NUENDO

Project Sessions and Templates downloads

Template used in the video tutorial

• Steinberg Nuendo Tutorial Template
  Binaural, Atmos 5.1.4, NHK 22.2 with binaural monitoring

Other templates

• Basic music NPR
  Stereo, 5.1, Atmos 5.1.4  output formats with binaural monitoring.

• Advanced multi-format NPR
  Atmos 7.1.2, NHK 22.2 and multiple binaural output formats.

• Ambisonic HOA mixing NPR
  HOA in 3rd order and binaural monitoring output formats.

Resources for more information and troubleshooting

• Nuendo (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• SPAT Revolution  Send and Return DAW Troubleshooting (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• How to set up SPAT Revolution with NUENDO (YouTube Tutorial)
• SPAT Revolution Integration with Nuendo 10 (Steinberg Yamaha Network Channel on YouTube)

AVID Pro Tools

Project Sessions and Templates downloads

Template used in the video tutorial

• AVID Pro Tools Tutorial Template
  Binaural 5.1 and 7.1.2 output formats

Other templates

• Basic music PTX
  Stereo, 5.1, Atmos 5.1.4  output formats with binaural monitoring

• Advanced multi-format PTX
  Atmos 7.1.2, NHK 22.2 and multiple binaural output formats

• Ambisonic HOA mixing PTX
  HOA 3rd order and  binaural monitoring output formats

Note: For Avid HDx users, please make sure to use the specific Pro Tools HDX template session. This ensures that the Native SPAT Revolution plugin gets instantiated under Pro Tools HDX systems using local audio path (the audio pipe or bridge) function of SPAT Revolution production suite.

Resources for more information and troubleshooting

• AVID Pro Tools (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• SPAT Revolution Send and Return DAW Troubleshooting (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• How to set up SPAT Revolution with Pro Tools (YouTube Tutorial)

Merging Technologies Pyramix

Project Sessions and Templates downloads

Template used in the video tutorial

• Merging Tutorial Template
  Binaural, 5.1 and NHK 22.2 output formats.

Other Templates

• Basic music PMX
  Stereo, 5.1, Atmos 5.1.4  output formats with binaural monitoring.
  
  
• Advanced multi-format PMX
  Atmos 7.1.2, NHK 22.2 and multiple binaural output formats.
• Ambisonic HOA mixing PMX
  HOA in 3rd order and binaural monitoring output formats.

Resources for more information and troubleshooting

• SPAT Revolution Send and Return DAW Troubleshooting (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• How to set up Spat Revolution with Pyramix (YouTube Tutorial)

 Cockos Reaper

Project Sessions and Templates downloads

Template used in the video tutorial

• Reaper Tutorial Template
  Binaural, 5.1 and NHK 22.2 output formats.

Other Templates

• Basic music REA
  Stereo, 5.1, Atmos 5.1.4  output formats with Binaural monitoring.
• Advanced multi-format REA
  Atmos 7.1.2, NHK 22.2 and multiple binaural output formats.
  
• Ambisonic HOA mixing REA
  HOA 3rd order and  binaural monitoring output formats.

Resources for more information and troubleshooting

• Cockos Reaper (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• SPAT Revolution Send and Return DAW Troubleshooting (SPAT Revolution User Guide)
• How to set up Spat Revolution with Reaper (YouTube Tutorial)

Additional Resources

Our product specialists are continuously working on different setups and templates, and in the future we will add templates for Steinberg Nuendo, Ableton Live and many others.

• Daw Integration Templates (FLUX:: Knowledge Base)
• Bitwig Studio (SPAT Revolution User Guide)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands—April 2020…

Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) is both a theater venue and home to a large-scale, international traveling company presenting established and new theater and dance works. Led by director Ivo van Hove, ITA has increasingly worked with immersive sound environments in recent years. It can be demanding in its home theater, and can present special challenges when the company travels. “One of our venues is about 600 seats, a modern blackbox theater,” remarks ITA sound department member and sound system designer Erwin Sterk. “But we also tour to huge auditoriums with 2,000 seats, and it was quite hard to have our streams or files for immersive audio working in different speaker setups.”

Sterk and his team could partially meet the challenges with various combinations of software but none were entirely satisfactory until they started using FLUX:: Immersive’s Spat Revolution software. Initially, they experimented with an earlier Max patch version of Spat from IRCAM, recalls Sterk, “but Spat from IRCAM was still somewhat experimental, and not completely an end user product for live shows. We used it for tests and to create the reverb, but I’d always end up bouncing the results.”

Two years ago, Sterk found out that FLUX:: Immersive had built a finished product that works with OSC. The timing was perfect, as ITA was preparing a new show called A Little Life, with a string quartet and a composer whose work Sterk felt would benefit from Spat. The composer trusted Sterk’s judgement, and the results were excellent. “We ended up using Spat for a lot of the soundscapes that surround the audience, and I also used it for amplifying the string quartet,” Sterk recalls. “The show was quite intense, and at times we used Spat to spatialize and move the separate instruments around the audience. And when the quartet switched from playing harmoniously and softly to playing something very staccato and abstract, suddenly they’re dry and spatialized. People were saying, “Wow, it sounds so natural, and you don’t hear the amplification. How do you achieve that?” The creative team and composer were amazed by how quickly we could achieve this without re-programming in the mixing desk.”

This kind of programming with a mixing console takes a lot of time and is more complicated, Sterk relates, “and in stressful situations it’s tricky because you can mess up with your scenes or with your routing. With Spat’s virtual spaces, it’s more realistic and consistent. You can mix the directions where the source comes from, and Spat calculates all the reflections and the reverb.”

In the another play, an actor is playing different roles, such as the maitre d’hote / hotel clerk, or a vendor who is selling strawberries on the beach. “When he’s shouting from off stage, like ‘Buone fragole!’ or making an announcement in the hotel, we use Spat to place it so it sounds like he’s located where we want him,” describes Sterk. “The results moving from the rehearsal room to the venue are amazing. We even use Spat as a reverb engine for some objects in the rooms that don’t move, and we use it as a surround burst.”

At times, Sterk employs Spat as one would a game engine. “In a video game, you have music and effects around you, and they’re all oriented relative to your changing position,” he observes. “Using sound as objects opens a whole new set of creative tools for a variety of applications” as sounds are moving around you or an audience starts moving.

One of the biggest advantages of using Spat for a touring company like ITA is the ability to re-create a design in different venues. “If you move to a new venue, you have to adapt the speaker plan,” details Sterk. “In Spat it’s easy to make changes to the speaker positions in the software to re-create the sound of the room. But there is more. If, for example, your sound effect is a bird flying around, and you don’t like the trajectory in the new venue, you don’t have to re-create your whole show file. With three mouse clicks, you can draw a new line, listen to it, and have the new version for today. With Spat, if you know the OSC commands, you can start from scratch and work with it. We finally have a tool that we can easily bring into a production without needing a big investment.”

Sterk especially likes to use his imagination with Spat. “It’s really cool to use Spat live, and it’s super-fast,” he offers. “When the director wants something special, you can make it directly with your mouse or with a touch screen. When he’s happy, you can re-record the OSC files with a sequencer, to reproduce what you did. When using Spat, I don’t care about the numbers anymore; I completely forget about the values of settings. I get the speakers and the objects right, and I’m just creating a sound I am looking for. And Spat has parameters you don’t have in other tools that enable you to create cool sounds. We used Spat to create a really nice effect with a fade from a small to a big room and from big room to small, changing the room absorption. There are a lot of fun things you can do.”

Although one can use Spat for wild immersive effects for live concerts or theatrical plays, Sterk feels that isn’t always the best use. “I think it works more to place the whole audience in a room with re-created room acoustics to extend your soundscapes,” he opines. “You get a better and equal mix because you can achieve a localization that’s spread over multiple speakers. Spatialisation adds an extra dimension to the creative pallet. Whether it’s a trumpet flying around or realistic acoustics in a particular scene, it has to be an extension of the story you want to tell. We can achieve that with Spat, and that’s why it’s the best on the market.”

Tokyo, Japan – April 2020…

Shinjuku has a long history as one of Tokyo’s most vibrant areas, and Waseda is arguably the district’s cultural and creative nexus. The area is home to the renowned Waseda University, as well as numerous museums, theaters, night clubs, and performance spaces.

Waseda’s newest venue, the Artware hub, opened its doors in late 2019. Commissioned by the Kakehashi (Arts and Cultural Foundation), the space is the realization of a lifelong dream of Roland Corporation founder and visionary Ikutaro Kakehashi.

What appears at first glance to be a fairly typical live performance venue is, in fact, much more. Designed as an experimental acoustic space, the facility incorporates an unparalleled 36.8 multi-channel immersive audio system based around FLUX::Immersive’s SPAT Revolution software engine.

The concept for the space was brought to life by Ikuo Kakehashi, the Kakehashi Foundation’s Director, and son of the famed inventor, working with producer/engineer Keiichi Itoh. As Ikuo explains, his father was always cognizant of the relationship between music and technology, and the impact of an environment on creative collaboration. “My father used to say that no matter how good the instrument maker made the instrument, it would be meaningless without a proper place to experience it,” Ikuo observes.

The venue takes its name from the term “Artware,” coined by Ikutaro Kakehashi. The term refers to not just hardware and software, but also to the human experience of an artistic performance. “We wanted to create a space that was more than merely a concert hall, that was a place where content of all kinds could be realized, and an environment where multiple people could gather and share in that performance,” Ikuo explains.

The immersive listening experience was an important part of the performance environment for Ikutaro Kakehashi. As early as 1991, he had developed a 3D audio processor dubbed RSS – Roland Sound Space – one of a number of early attempts to create an immersive experience using regular stereo speaker configuration. “In designing the space, one of the most important areas of content creation for us was immersive audio,” Ikuo confirms.

At the heart of the immersive audio system is FLUX:: Immersive’s SPAT Revolution, providing acoustic simulation that allows the user to freely arrange input sources in a virtual space where loudspeakers may be freely placed to create virtually any configuration of sonic landscape.

The system is configured using a single purpose-built computer. An RME HDSPe-MADI FX interface provides up to 64 channels of MADI I/O at 96kHz across the 36-channel system. An Avid S6L console offers tight integration with SPAT Revolution for controlling input sources. Since the actual FOH mix position is program dependent, the S6L is purposely housed in a road case to enable it to be moved to the appropriate sweet spot.

Audio sources from the stage, as well as pro tools outputs, are connected to the S6L via AVB, and signal is routed to SPAT via MADI. An Avid MTRIX is at the core of the Artware hub system, providing routing matrix and system monitoring and control. Outputs are converted from MADI to Dante for system distribution.

The multi-channel speaker arrangement is comprised of 24 in-wall speakers at two elevations, 2.5 meters and 5 meters, each with 12 speakers arranged in 360 degrees at 30 degrees apart. Nine more speakers – eight in a circle and one at zenith – are attached to a central grid mounted to the ceiling. Three more speakers occupy temporary locations on the front floor for special effects. Eight subwoofers in four cardioid pairs complete the loudspeaker configuration.

Since its opening in the fall of 2019, the Artware hub has hosted a wide range of performances and garnered high praise from visitors and performers alike. Thanks to the efforts of Ikuo Kakehashi and Keichi Ito, and innovative technologies like SPAT Revolution, Ikutaro Kakehashi’s vision can finally be realized.

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