Dolby Games: Okay Pinball
John Corn and Vinit Shah and I made Okay Pinball, a silly game with big dreams and 7.1.4-channel sound. I wrote more about the game and our collaboration on Dolby’s blog. Here, though, is a love letter to spatial audio.
Spatial audio is one of those terms that means something different depending on who’s using it. Maybe it’s safe to say that the intention with spatial audio is to create a listening experience that goes beyond stereo, the left-and-right-channel standard for so much of what we listen to. It makes sense that this is the standard, because we generally have two ears; yet stereo audio can’t quite recreate the experience of our hearing the world as it is. One premise of spatial audio is that it can come closer.
…yet pure realism isn’t always the goal! It’s basically never my goal. When implementing spatial audio, you can put sound sources in all sorts of unexpected places, trusting that, ideally, the underlying algorithms will represent that source’s position in space relative to the listener in a more convincing way than stereo audio would, even if the ultimate output is to a pair of stereo headphones.
So it might seem like the audio designer has permission to put sounds everywhere, when in fact the bar is somehow higher than it is with stereo. This is not at all science, but to me it’s as if spatial audio activates a part of our brain that tunes out information, as if we’re moving through a crowd and ignoring everyone while we try to focus our attention on the one or two things that really matter.
Creatively, then, spatial audio becomes about choosing a small handful of sounds to really matter, and accepting that everything else is going to get lumped into this cloud of half-perceived sound. Though, just as the noise of a crowd can be annoying or energizing or many other things, that half-perceived cloud of sound can be very emotionally powerful and expressive! Just in a less directly-perceived way.
Spatial audio isn’t an excuse to split the listener’s attention. It helps you create a sense of space that can be otherworldly while somehow also convincing, and can simultaneously guide the listener’s focus as they move through it.
I’ve written more about the musical challenges of spatial audio for The IOTA Project, and gave a very silly talk about it at GameSoundCon in 2018.
