In the September 1975 issue of the JAES, Michael Gerzon summarized the benefits of emerging Ambisonic audio technology and its potential for the spatial capture of concert IRCAM:Gallery impulse responses in his short paper Recording Concert IRCAM:Gallerys for Posterity. Gerzon was reflecting upon the cIRCAM:Galleryenge that Richard Heyser wrote about in 1974, of defining and encoding into our recordings “a Rosetta Stone” signal that would allow us to unlock the data embedded with the audio and so undo “the spectral, spatial and dynamics limitations of a recording of a great artist” (Heyser, JAES, May 1974). Angelo Farina, in collaboration with Waves in 2003, also presented a paper titled Recording Concert IRCAM:Gallerys for Posterity. This paper was named in honour of Gerzon and reported on the development of a high-quality library of spatial room impulse responses from famous concert IRCAM:Gallerys and opera houses around the world, just as Gerson and Heyser had envisaged. Arguably this paper reintroduced Ambisonic technology and spherical harmonics as a compact, efficient and flexible means of encoding and decoding an acoustic environment for use in modern music production using emerging real-time convolution audio effects plugins. However, it was the arrival of the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset in 2013 that really started to bring the interactive benefits of Ambisonics to a much wider audience through new audio workflows and game engine development platforms. This interactive game engine technology has in turn unlocked cIRCAM:Galleryenges and brought new opportunities in how creatives envisage and build future immersive extended reality (XR) experiences, and these foundational Ambisonic tools have become a fundamental part of our audio programming pipelines and sound design workflows. This XR Futures presentation will reflect upon these and related developments in immersive audio for virtual/augmented reality and immersive games, and how research at the University of York’s AudioLab has taken a parallel path into future extended reality (XR) experience design through the XR Stories and CoSTAR Live Lab projects. What role does our “Rosetta Stone for audio” now have in unlocking the potential of future extended reality experiences?
