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It was part of an episode of Blue Peter in which the audio team’s Chris Pike explained the concept of binaural. You can find it  from minute 17 onwards.  

For the production we combined traditional dummy head recordings with additional elements using our ±«Óãtv R&D binaural renderer during the mixing process. All dialog and some of the effects are recorded using the dummy head, and the special effects and ‘space ship’ sounds are mixed in during the post-production stage.  

Standards

You may think that the topic of standards is unlikely to make for exciting reading in a blog post. Generally you’d be right since it often involves a lot of work on documents and long conversations to find agreement and compromises. However I think the latest developments are very exiting especially in the (ITU).

We are working hard with our international colleagues and experts to develop new file formats, streaming formats and most importantly a baseline renderer for production and quality evaluation in next generation audio systems. These are key elements to bring new user experiences like immersive audio and responsive content to life and make them available at scale for our audiences.

It also will be the foundation needed to make the we have presented to you in various forms available on a regular basis. Advanced experiences like variable length programmes rely on the development of new standards and workflows. We have been demonstrating these experiences for a while but now our colleagues from the User Experience and Accessibility Team here in the North Lab have made an example available on . Please .

For the first time we were also able to contribute some research results to the ITU that came out of the running under the . This work addresses new standards for loudness measurement for next generation audio systems including object-based and binaural audio.  

Presentations and Publications

Over the last couple of months we presented the results of our research at various conferences and events. Since we believe that audio content delivered over the internet and personalised by audio processing in the web browser is a very relevant trend we made a substantial contribution to the .

The papers are now online and available for free. Please have a look to get more insight into our work on personalised compression lead by Andrew Mason, Venue Explorer audio led by Matthew Paradis and also David Marston's and Chris Pike's work on the Audio Definition Model and options to render it in the web browser.

Since object-based audio is becoming relevant for more European broadcasters, we presented our collaborative project with the , and on object-based radio programmes in a tutorial at the hosted by the European Broadcasting Union.