Now singer Alicia Keys and Bob Clearmountain, the recording engineer who mixed Bruce Springsteen’s popular album Born in the U.S.A are all praises of Spatial Audio. Here’s how Spatial Audio can transform music altogether for music composers and for listeners. Talking about Spatial Audio, Alicia Keys said to The New York Times that music engineers working on her albums “completely reimagined every note, every sound, every instrument, every voice. It sounds like you’ve never heard it before. I mean, I never even heard it like this before. It really is a new experience.” She has released eight albums until now in Dolby Atmos. Here’s what she said: “The idea of messing with stereo signals to create an entirely artificial sense of three-dimensional space didn’t strike me as something I was likely to enjoy. The technique involves adjusting both the sound frequencies and phase timings to fool the ears into thinking that each element of the sound originates from a particular position in space. That seemed to me to have great potential to ruin, rather than enhance, the sound reproduction.” Spatial Audio needs to be carefully used and many music labels are creating music with Dolby Atmos remixes but they are not involving original artists or the production team in the process. “The labels seem to be farming this stuff out and it isn’t always being done with the original artist or production team involved. I know that’s not always possible. But sometimes what comes back are just bad mixes — or strange mixes, anyway,” Clearmountain said. “Music has become background noise for most people. It’s something in your headphones while you’re out doing other stuff. When I was a teenager, I used to listen to an album three, four times through just sitting in front of my speakers, entranced. If we’re able to get people to understand what it is and hear it the right way,” added Clearmountain. Speaking to The New York Times, producer and engineer Brad Wood praised Spatial Audio and said when the technology is used in the right way, it can transform the overall experience of listening to music.
