The Planets: exploring new symphonic realities in an inter-galactic 3D audio soundwalk
There is a certain sensation in listening to the sound of the orchestra from within the orchestra itself: a physical, larger-than-life experience that disappears as soon as the sound is heard from the more distant perspective of the audience. The “Inside MPhil” project, a collaboration between the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Sofilab, aims to make this experience, previously reserved for the orchestra members themselves, accessible to the public.
With this focus on accessibility, we developed an interactive GPS-driven app that runs on standard smartphones with standard headphones to deliver a 6 DOF experience built on the Unity game engine with Dear Reality Binauralization technology to create an imaginary orchestra in a green field that can be sonically explored by walking inside. Special attention was paid to making the musical quality as vivid as possible, using a specially miked concert recording rather than an instrument-separated studio recording.
In this article, we describe the workflow, discuss the decisions we had to make along the way, and go over our learnings that we will apply to our next projects.