AES announces first ever Immersive Audio Academy

The AES (Audio Engineering Society) has announced details of its first ever Immersive Audio Academy, which will explore technology and solutions in immersive and binaural audio.

Registration is now open for the one-day online event, taking place on Thursday, February 11 from 12:00pm to 9:00pm ET.  The event will launch a series focusing on the latest production and emerging technologies in immersive and binaural audio. 

The programme’s Workshop and Master Class sessions will take on diverse applications of immersive audio production, from live events, to gaming, movies, and beyond. Participants will receive a certificate of achievement after completing the sessions. 

The AES Immersive Audio Academy will open with Introduction & Immersive Audio Past, Present & Future with event co-chairs Steve Martz and Andres Mayo, followed by the Genelec partner session Immersive Audio for Music: A practical session to develop from stereo to immersive. 

Immersive Audio for Live Events follows, with insight to the challenges and opportunities in immersive sound reinforcement hosted by Etienne Corteel and Scott Sugden of L-Acoustics.

Further implementation of immersive audio practices will be discussed by Scott Selfon of Facebook Reality Labs in the session Audio Futures: Technologies for Games, which looks at the immersive worlds of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality and their implications for current games, both screen- and head-mounted-display-based. 

The following session, Immersive in Recording / Conversion to Dolby Atmos, will take an in-depth look at the GRAMMY-winning album Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? by Fantastic Negrito (Xavier Dphrepaulezz), who will take part in the discussion, along with the album’s engineer, Nahuel Bronzini, and mastering engineer Michael Romanowski, who handled the Atmos mixing and mastering.

A workshop and masterclass session – Producing High Quality Immersive Audio – follows, presenting an intensive hands-on session exploring 360 audio production, hosted by Andres Mayo (@360MusicLab) with Brian Glasscock (Sennheiser) and Achim Fell (Dear Reality). 

The afternoon concludes with a look at Immersive in Movies, with John Kellogg and Brian Slack of Xperi/DTS, who will demonstrate a system whereby an immersive audio mix can be acoustically encoded into a 5.1, then decoded back to an immersive environment.

Registration is $49 for AES members ($99 non-member), with members also receiving access to on-demand playback of the Academy sessions. Register at aesshow.com/immersive, and make plans to join us for the first event in AES’s series dedicated to immersive audio and related technologies.