The sound of the future

As, respectively, Co-Founder & Technical Director, and Founding Partner & Creative Sound Designer of Grand Central Recording Studios [GCRS], Ivor Taylor and Raja Sehgal know a thing or two about beautiful noise.

With decades worth of expertise between them, including installing home studios for the Pink Floyd band members and a short stint on the Dark Side of the Moon tour [Taylor], and producing sound at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival aged 14, and working on award-winning spots for Nike, Jaguar, Heineken and a slew of others [Sehgal], the pair have been in the sound mix for a long time. 

Below, they explain what's happening now in sound design, why the approach to it is changing, and how the emerging technology is going to usher in an aural revolution. 

Sound has often been something of an afterthought for agencies and clients; has that situation changed?

RS: On experiential and film, sound has become really important. Creatives are across sound and how it benefits the project, and we are brought on board very early on in the process as part of a collaboration. Our partners, Framestore, whom we have produced unique theme park rides with, are a great example of this. High profile TV commercials are similar in that sound is often a vital element. Creatives not only want to win awards for picture but sound also, and that translates to how a project is conceived. Many of the top drawer TV spots spend as much time on the creative sound design as the visuals. 

The awful sound coming from modern flat screen televisions has, perversely, helped to turn the public’s eyes and ears towards demanding a better sound experience.

IT: In the media family sound has, for a long time, been the poor relative no one wanted to talk about, with the lion’s share of funding going to the development of visual technologies. Visual technologies are now very mature so it is only right that the spotlight is starting to turn to sound. The awful sound coming from modern flat screen televisions has, perversely, helped to turn the public’s eyes and ears towards demanding a better sound experience. Soundbars, more surround speakers at home and in the cinema, and listening on earbuds have all sensitised Joe Public to the transformational magic that technically and creatively high quality sound can bring to their experience.

Above: Raja Sehgal, left, and Ivor Taylor in Studio 8 of the GCRS building.

What are the biggest misconceptions people have when they consider the sound element of a commercial - or any - project?

RS: The end user doesn’t necessarily consider sound. They may appreciate a fancy VFX commercial for its pictures [but] most consumers may not even know that they are listening to special audio on their headphones, they are just enjoying the end result; they don’t need to know why their music sounds the way it does.

Simply said, the greatest sounds are sounds that you do not notice.

IT: This depends on who these ‘people’ are. Almost all visual media is now deeply edited, with jump cuts and scene changes. The sound that Joe Public hears seamlessly joins these storyline changes. The fact that this soundscape is constructed from disparate and disconnected sound elements, and is then woven in such a way, supports and reinforces the commercial’s message. If Joe notices the separate elements then that breaks his focus from the storyline. Simply said, the greatest sounds are sounds that you do not notice. Having said that, with the new and emerging immersive sound technologies things may change as sound designers place sounds away from the visual stage into the surrounding room. Early days.

Above: The cinematic experience can now be achieved at home. 

Have the advances in home audio-visual systems made great sound more accessible to audiences and, therefore, more important to the filmmaking process?

RS: Absolutely. The biggest advancement is the spatial sound environment created in people’s living rooms. In general, a consumer these days (apart from me, perhaps) does not want lots of speakers and wires in their living room. Now the cinematic experience can be achieved with one sound bar that has many speakers firing in different directions, which is pretty mind blowing.

The biggest advancement is the spatial sound environment created in people’s living rooms.

IT: Yes. The biggest changes are still to come, with the development of audio technologies which need less speakers to deliver immersive surround sound. Dolby has always pioneered this area, with Atmos moving from many, many speakers in the cinema to as few as eight when using Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers for Home Atmos. Now, with Dolby Music, the ability to deliver highly immersive locational sound from two speakers has arrived.

Above: Homes no longer need an overabundance of speakers to get fantastic sound.

What are the latest technological advances in sound design that GCRS has been able to offer clients?

IT: The challenge, as always, is to get clients to risk new ways of creating and delivering sound. GCRS has always offered clients the latest in immersive audio technologies. In 1994 we were offering commercial clients Dolby Surround Sound, then 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Atmos Theatrical, High Order Ambisonics and, now, Dolby Home Atmos and Dolby Music.

Getting them to use them is another matter. The technology advances lead by Dolby have given directors and creatives sound tools which have challenged the old school focus on the narrative on the screen. Non-3D visuals are 2D, but sound has always been 3D and now, with immersive audio, the precise placement and localisation of sound(s) outside of the screen is possible.

Immersive sound should add not detract from the overall experience and it will only do this if it is in harmony with the visuals.

Creatively, the early use of Surround Sound was to place spot SFX around a room for shock affect. Raja has always pioneered moving away from using the surround speakers solely for spot affects, to creating a fully immersive soundscape. The challenge for directors and creatives still remains as not allowing surround/immersive sound to detract from the picture scape. Immersive sound should add not detract from the overall experience and it will only do this if it is in harmony with the visuals, and vice versa. When it's right it’s synergistic; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Above: Nike's Write the Future is one of many high-end commercials which Sehgal and GCRS has worked on.

Why did you decide to upgraded one of your studios, and how fast do advancements in sound technology evolve? 

RS: Sound advancements are happening way more quickly than we anticipated. Some things we couldn't have imagined have been achieved in the last three-to-four years. Studio 8 was created for experimentation; a science laboratory for sound, covering ambisonics to Dolby Atmos. With 54 Speakers, bespoke setups can be created which allow us to be one step ahead when the right brief comes in. Studio 8 was not pre-designed, as many studios are, so that as sound tech evolves we can evolve with it. The latest buzz was seeing Raja grinning like a Cheshire cat when he played me a Dolby Music track.

The latest buzz was seeing Raja grinning like a Cheshire cat when he played me a Dolby Music track.

IT: We have always wanted to push the envelope of how and what you can achieve with sound. The fun part is when new techniques and/or technologies arrive. The latest buzz was seeing Raja grinning like a Cheshire cat when he played me a Dolby Music track; just two speakers delivering an immersive music mix with room-filling, spatially separated and localised music elements.  Marcus – one of our young up-and-coming sound designers, had to ask Raj if he was using the fully Atmos array, it was that impressive.

You've worked a lot on physical installations for events and theme parks; what are the differences between working on those and on TV commercials?

RS: You can’t compare immersive sound for installations and what is standardised sound for TV commercials. With a TV spot, you know when you enter the studio what you will be delivering. An installation involves a bespoke approach over several months, with a lot of pre-planning and R&D. When a theme park project starts we don’t know if we’ll be using one speaker or 100 speakers. The tech is completely tailored.

It’s a whole new world for sound, and that is really exciting.

IT: Yes, and once a mix is finalised the next step is to compete a final on-site mix, thus ensuring that the mix is not murdered by a bad installation, and also to optimise for the on-site acoustics. It's also a proving ground for sound. Experiential projects are only limited by the imagination of their creators and budget, so they place new and unprecedented demands on sound design and sound delivery. It’s a whole new world for sound, and that is really exciting.

Above: Dolby Music is taking listening to new heights.

With Dolby Atmos now offered by Apple Music, and the format likened to TV's transition to HD, will radically improved audio become a standard fixture for commercial work of the future? 

RS: Without consumers knowing, immersive sound is already in millions of homes, delivered across many devices, from phones, laptops, headphones, TVs, soundbars and smart speakers. Netflix streams much of its content in Dolby Atmos, so people with the right, and easily available tech will be getting a cinematic experience.

Sound has evolved so much that an immersive audio mix can sound like its coming from all around you even though it’s only coming from two speakers. 

Dolby Music is taking this one step further and it’s already becoming the normal delivery format for a new album. I predict some form of special immersive music technology will be adopted by the music streaming services, across any digital music format you listen to; a standard fixture on everything. Sound has evolved so much that an immersive audio mix can sound like its coming from all around you even though it’s only coming from two speakers. 

Regarding commercials, it’s probably too soon for broadcasters to adopt Home Atmos as they are currently focusing on streaming and sports platforms. But, after mixing so much immersive content, where every sound has much more space, this has really influenced how I mix a TV spot.

IT: I agree with Raj. New audio immersive tools will ‘leak’ into all aspects of sound for commercials and sound generation for media. Listening to YouTube on a laptop you can often suddenly hear immersive audio tracks turning up. But it’s not all about the technology; one of the key changes will be Joe Public adapting to how they listen to spatial audio coming out of two speakers. The brain has an amazing ability to extract spatial sound imagery just from two ears. The more Joe listens to spatial audio, the better the imagery will become as his brain ‘learns’ how to extract the rich locational information embedded in expert spatial audio.