Image credit: York Tillyer
Flow is a MyWorld-funded Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) project supported by Digital Catapult. CR&D projects address emerging challenges in the Creative Industries.
The Flow project develops and trials new creative immersive music production workflows to overcome current challenges of moving between stereo and immersive formats. It also explores ways of creating scalable immersive music experiences for audiences to enjoy in-person at venues investing in immersive audio playback systems such as cinemas.
Flow is a collaboration between Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, Adrian Utley from the band Portishead, Dr. Ruth Farrar from Bath Spa University, Dr. Felix Carter from the University of Bristol and Theo Kozlowski from the University of Bath.
While making Flow, the team is also developing equipment set-up and sound capture approaches for creating novel immersive audio compositions, elevating production processes from traditional stereo to being truly immersive.
Most immersive music content is currently re-purposed stereo productions never intended to be heard outside the two-speaker stereo environment with the resulting output feeling disconnected and unfulfilling. In contrast, music made by Flow’s Creator-in-Residence Adrian Utley is immersive right from the outset.
Flow’s Academic Lead, Dr. Ruth Farrar from the Immersive Audio Network and Bath Spa University recently spoke with Hans-Martin Buff about immersive music-making.
Hans-Martin Buff is a world-leading immersive music specialist and pioneer in 3D audio. This year, he won a ‘Best Immersive Audio Album’ Grammy for Peter Gabriel’s i/o album (In-Side Mix). Buff is also Flow’s immersive engineer and producer on this CR&D project. He designed all the immersive set ups, co-produced and mixed Flow.
Image credit: York Tillyer
RF: For musicians and producers making the first move from working in stereo and mono to working immersively, what advice would you give them?
H-M B: Have fun. Don’t sweat the technical specs too much. Just grab some free binauralizer plugin tools and give it a go. You’ll never turn back.
No two productions are the same and you want to use immersive techniques in a way that is not gimmicky but rather adds to the narrative and intention of the song. There are endless opportunities with immersive music making. However, are there any techniques that would be useful to know that demonstrate immersive music making’s capabilities?
Immersive music production really is arrangement on steroids. Arrangement, in any form, is the act of guiding attention with music. In real life, we want things that demand our full attention to be in front of us, so we know what’s going on. If something worthy of our attention approaches us from the rear, we even turn our face towards it. It’s worth keeping these everyday sonic experiences in mind when placing sounds in the immersive world. Is the sound leading the listener’s attention? Better put it in front then. Is it a sound canvas supporting the main story? Maybe place the sound to the sides or the rear.
Image credit: York Tillyer
Can you tell us a bit about the creative experimentation of microphone positioning when immersively recording Flow?
All of Flow’s recording took place at Real World Studios working with Flow’s Creator-in-Residence Adrian Utley from the band Portishead. For the guitar piece on Flow, we had seven guitars playing in the Big Room at Real Word Studios each simultaneously fed into a DI [a direct input box] and to a different amp in the Wood Room. The seven amps were placed in the separate Wood Room in a circle facing outward, with an 8-mic array placed in the middle of the circle. The recorded guitars/amps were panned according to their actual placement in the Wood Room.
For acoustic guitar recordings, we used a Neumann U67 microphone and Submarine SubSix, a hexaphonic guitar pick up, which has an output for each individual string. These individual outputs were each fed into a guitar pedal and panned around the room.
We played with layering various mono guitar parts by Adrian for the Flow piece, and we also experimented with pointing height microphones towards the floor, which created an interesting effect for the string-based drone piece in Flow.
Is there anything else that you think would be useful for a musician or producer to know when starting out making immersive music?
Immersive is NOT a mixing process. It’s about making new music, not about repositioning stereo. So, tell the musical story you want to tell with all the space around you, using as much or as little of it as you want.
What do you think is the future for immersive music?
For true adoption in the future, rather than immersive music being a one-off event, it would be great for musicians to have immersive music making in their toolbox at the creative music-making stage if the song’s material requires it. For example, on an album, a musician could choose to have eight songs in stereo, 1 in one mono and 2 in immersive.
Thank you Buff. We look forward to the final version of Flow being played to public audiences in Autumn 2025.
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