Ears and Hearing

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares169 Views

    LeVar Burton’s New ‘Sound Detectives’ Podcast Urges Children to Listen

    by

    The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening.LeVar Burton has spent much of his career encouraging children to read. Now he is urging them to listen — really listen.They can develop that skill, along with an ear for mysteries, in “Sound Detectives,” a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure. Co-produced by SiriusXM’s Stitcher Studios and LeVar Burton Entertainment, “Sound Detectives” features Burton as a fictionalized version of himself, an inventor with the same name.“In a certain sense, ‘LeVar Burton’ has reached iconic status,” Burton said in a phone conversation. “And it’s fun for me to lean into that.” He added, “It’s also an opportunity for me to introduce ‘LeVar’ to another generation.”Many adults recognize Burton as the actor who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, fans pushed for him to be named the host of “Jeopardy!,” a role for which he very publicly campaigned. But to large numbers of today’s parents, he is most familiar from their own childhoods as the host of the Emmy-winning public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.“LeVar Burton Reads,” his literary podcast for adults, has been downloaded more than 54 million times, according to SiriusXM.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe LeVar Burton of the 10-part “Sound Detectives,” which debuted on Wednesday — SiriusXM will release a new episode every week thereafter — is an audiophile planning to open a magnificent institution, the Museum of Sound. But he discovers that sounds are becoming separated from their sources and going missing.To resolve the crisis, he hires a Philip Marlowe-style sleuth, Detective Hunch, and sends him an assistant in the form of one of his own inventions: Audie, a 3-foot-5-inch-tall walking, talking ear. In each episode, Hunch and Audie must analyze an errant sound, identify it and return it to its origins, while also trying to unmask the Sound Swindler, the human culprit who is causing the disappearances.“Sound Detectives” is the real LeVar Burton’s first podcast for children, but he stressed that he did not see it as a long-awaited return to young people’s entertainment. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever left it,” he said. Burton, 66, who has remained active in children’s literacy through founding Skybrary, a digital library of e-books and videos, said he had not ruled out a young listener’s version of “LeVar Burton Reads,” his SiriusXM literary podcast. (According to the company, it has been downloaded more than 54 million times since its premiere six years ago.)But what appealed to him about “Sound Detectives” was that he did not have the burden of being the podcast’s sole maker or its star. The independent producers Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith (Smith is also the producer of “LeVar Burton Reads”) created the podcast and developed it with Burton before pitching it to Sirius XM. “Sound Detectives” focuses more on the private eye — and the accompanying ear — than on the famous voice that gives them their missions.To large numbers of today’s parents, Burton is most familiar as the host of the public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.PBSBurton also admired the plan for each episode’s end: Once the missing sound is returned, young listeners hear an on-location interview with real experts who deal with it in their work.The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said, and “it introduces them to parts of the world that they might not have yet been exposed to. And those are the key precepts that were the drivers to ‘Reading Rainbow.’”“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.“We hadn’t heard of another show that was dealing exclusively with sound as, like, the main narrative driver for a podcast,” Sokolowski said. “And it just seemed like a wonderful way to not only engage kids in the format, but also in the method and delivery and style and every aspect of the show.”Although the podcast industry is undergoing retrenchment, “Sound Detectives” is entering a children’s market that seems nowhere near saturation, said Megan Lazovick, a vice president at Edison Research, an analytics company in Somerville, N.J.Edison’s first national study of the children’s market (conducted recently with the advocacy organization Kids Listen) found that 29 percent of children ages 6 to 12 had listened to a podcast the previous month. That figure rose to 42 percent if their parents had also listened to one.Lazovick predicted that Burton’s association with “Sound Detectives” would be a big draw for parents. She mentioned how the new “Disney Frozen: Forces of Nature” podcast capitalized on the popularity of the “Frozen” film and its offshoots. “In the kids’ space, bringing in brands that are already trusted is sort of a no-brainer,” she said.Adam Sachs, SiriusXM’s senior vice president for entertainment, comedy and podcast programming, said that Burton was also a “huge factor” in the company’s commitment to the project.“Not only is he just a great podcast talent to work with, and we have a great track record with him,” Sachs said, “but he also has so much experience working in the kids’ content space that this sort of felt like the perfect opportunity for us to dip our toe in.” (SiriusXM declined to disclose the budget for “Sound Detectives.”)The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesSokolowski, who has a background in documentaries (among them, the films “Ovarian Psycos” and “Very Semi-Serious”), and Smith, who has experience in comedy (including the podcasts “Judge John Hodgman” and “Bubble”), are both parents who wanted “Sound Detectives” to be as layered as possible. In addition to investigating physics and acoustics, the podcast includes information on auditory biology (even most adults probably aren’t aware that the ears influence taste) and one episode that examines how deaf people experience sound as vibration.The two women, who wrote the scripts with Isabelle Redman Dolce, also decided that the dialogue would be partly improvised.“I like the energy that it brings, and the ideas that will sort of come forth that would probably never emerge in any other way,” Smith said. They sought actors with improv experience, and Vinny Thomas, who voices Detective Hunch, proved to be an authority on animal characteristics (like the fact that whale sharks lead solitary lives).“Hunch is kind of like an eccentric uncle,” Thomas said, “and what eccentric uncle isn’t a know-it-all?”Jessica McKenna, who portrays the ever-curious Audie, improvised song interludes as well as lines, using her skills to collaborate with the composer Adam Deibert on the jazzy “Sound Detectives” theme. “It’s a really goofy niche I’ve carved out for myself,” she said.In addition to being an ear, Audie personifies a child who is maybe “solving the case before the adult,” Sokolowski said.The creators of “Sound Detectives,” who have built a podcast website with related sleuthing activities, intend young listeners to become just as engaged as Audie in the season-long investigation.“One of the attractive exercises that we’re engaging in here is getting kids to listen critically to the world, right?” Burton said. “To use their powers of discernment, which is one of my favorite words.” More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Haptic Suits Let You Feel Music Through Your Skin

      by

      Jay Alan Zimmerman, a deaf composer and musician, was used to positioning himself near the speakers at clubs, straining to feel the vibrations of songs he could not hear.So when he was invited to test a new technology, a backpack, known as a haptic suit, designed for him to experience music as vibrations on his skin — a kick drum to the ankles, a snare drum to the spine — he was excited.“With captioning and sign language interpretation, your brain is forced to be in more than one place at a time,” Mr. Zimmerman, who began losing his hearing in his early 20s, said in a recent video interview.“With a haptic system,” he continued, “it can go directly to your body at the exact same moment, and there’s real potential for you to actually feel music in your body.”The type of haptic suit Mr. Zimmerman first tested, now nearly a decade ago, has recently become more accessible to the public. The devices were available at events this summer at Lincoln Center in New York City — including at a recent silent disco night, an event in which people dance while listening to music via wireless headphones — as well as at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, a Greta Van Fleet concert in Las Vegas and a performance at Opera Philadelphia.The devices, which translate music into vibrations that are transmitted to different points on the suit, are designed to be worn by both hearing individuals and those who are deaf or have hearing loss. Developed by the Philadelphia-based company Music: Not Impossible, the device consists of two ankle bands, two wrist bands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage. Wearing one of them feels a little like a full-body bear hug from a massage chair.Haptic suits, which are also used in virtual reality and video games, have been around for several decades. But the Music: Not Impossible suits are unique because the devices turn individual notes of music into specific vibrations. Other companies are also producing haptic products designed to capture the sonic experiences of various events. Examples include the crack of a baseball bat at a sporting event transmitted through vibrating seats, or more everyday experiences like the sound of a dog barking translated through a pattern of buzzes on a wearable bracelet.“There’s a revolution in haptic technology going on right now,” said Mark D. Fletcher, a researcher at the University of Southampton in Britain, who studies the use of haptics for supporting people who are deaf or have hearing loss.The development of the suits has benefited from recent advancements in microprocessors, wireless technology, batteries and artificial intelligence, he said, all key components in the emerging market of wearable haptic devices.The device consists of two ankle bands, two wristbands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage.Mick Ebeling, the founder of the Los Angeles-based Not Impossible Labs, was first inspired to experiment with haptic suits in 2014 when he saw a video of an event featuring a deaf D.J., with bass-heavy music pulsing through speakers facing the floor and people dancing barefoot. Mr. Ebeling wanted to find a better way for deaf people to experience music.Daniel Belquer, a composer who has a master’s degree in theater, soon came on board to find a way to transmit the experience of music straight into the brain. That mission, Mr. Belquer said, soon expanded to a goal of creating a tactile experience of music that was available for everyone, including people without hearing loss.Mr. Belquer joined the project because he was interested in helping the deaf community, but also because he was intrigued as a composer. He had written a master’s thesis on listening and was already producing sound with vibrating objects in his own shows.Mr. Belquer worked with engineers at Avnet, an electronics company, to produce a more nuanced haptic feedback system for use with musical experiences, which creates a sensation of touch through vibrations and wireless transmission without lag time. But the first prototypes were heavy and not sensitive enough to really translate the music.“As a composer, artistic expression is important, not just the tech side,” he said.He solicited feedback from members of the deaf community, including Mandy Harvey, a deaf singer and songwriter; as well as Mr. Zimmerman, the composer; and the sign language interpreter Amber Galloway.Mr. Zimmerman said that the first version of the device he tested was “not satisfying.”“Imagine having seven or eight different cellphones strapped to various parts of your body, attached to wires,” he said. “And then they all just start going off randomly.”Mr. Belquer worked to perfect the technology, he said, until up to 24 instruments or vocal elements in a song could each be translated to a different point on the suit.By 2018, he had created the first version of the current model, which offers three levels of intensity that can be set individually, as well as a fully customizable fit.Amanda Landers, a 36-year-old sign language instructor at Syosset High School on Long Island who has progressive hearing loss that began around the time she was in high school, said she thinks the suits are a radical way to create access for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.She first wore one of the vests last year, during a private demonstration with Mr. Belquer and Flavia Naslausky, the head of business development and strategy at Music: Not Impossible, after coming across the Not Impossible Labs website while researching emerging technologies for people with hearing loss to show her students.The company played her snippets from the film “Interstellar,” whose composer, Hans Zimmer, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original score. The biggest surprise, Ms. Landers said, was the intensity of the sensations.“When the song was getting lower, not only did the different parts of you vibrate; it actually got softer and more in-depth,” she said in a recent video interview. “And when it was louder, my whole body was shaking. Just the level of precision they put into it was astounding.”Lincoln Center made the Music: Not Impossible haptic suits available at two of its silent disco nights this summer. Attendees also listened to music via wireless headphones.The technology, which has been tested at a range of up to three-quarters of a mile from a stage, works for both throbbing bass tracks and classical pieces (it was mostly dance-pop and electronic music in the mix at a silent disco on a recent Saturday night at Lincoln Center).“What they’re doing is so important,” Ms. Landers said of Music: Not Impossible’s vision of creating a shared musical experience for all concertgoers. “People often look at inclusivity as something that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so complicated,’ and then they don’t do it, but it’s not that hard.”Music: Not Impossible currently provides the suits to organizations as part of a full-package deal, which includes up to 90 suits; a team of on-site staff members who will assist people with getting them on, answer questions and troubleshoot the technology; as well as a team of “vibro D.J.s” trained to customize the vibration transmission locations for each song in a set.Prices start at a few thousand dollars for a “basic experience,” Mr. Belquer said, which includes a couple of suits and a vibro D.J., and can reach six figures for experiences that absorb a significant part of the company’s 90-suit inventory in the United States.(Lincoln Center, which has made the suits available at a few events each summer since 2021, had 75 suits at two silent disco nights and a Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra concert this summer, up from the 50 it offered per event last year.)“The only requirement that we make on that front is that the deaf and hard-of-hearing never get charged for our experience,” Mr. Belquer said.Attendees at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights swayed to dance-pop tracks. But the unaffordability for most consumers is one reason that haptic suits, while promising, are currently an impractical option for most individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss.Dickie Hearts, a 25-year-old actor and artist in New York who was born Deaf and counts himself a regular among the city’s club scene, had the chance to try an earlier version of the Music: Not Impossible suits at a concert in Los Angeles around eight years ago. (Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.)While he appreciates the intention behind them, he said, he prefers having live American Sign Language interpretation alongside captions that convey the lyrics.“Feeling the vibration has never been an issue for me,” he said in a recent video call, conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to know what the words are. I don’t want to have to reach out to my hearing friend and be like, ‘Oh, what song are they playing?’”Another concern, he said, is that the packs could make Deaf people targets for bullies. At the event where he tested them in Los Angeles, he said, only Deaf people were using them, which made him feel singled out.But, he added, if hearing individuals in the audience were wearing the suits as well, as at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights, he would be interested in being part of that.Mr. Belquer said that Music: Not Impossible hoped to create a product everyone could use.That vision came to life at the Lincoln Center silent disco. As dusk fell, about 75 people, wearing either red, green or blue flashing headphones had a chance to experience the suits. They bopped and swayed to pulsing dance-pop tracks sometimes alone, carving their own circle of rhythm, and sometimes in groups.“It’s like raindrops on my shoulders,” said Regina Valdez, 55, who lives in Harlem.“Wow, it’s vibrating,” said Lucas Garcia, 6, who appeared surprised as he looked down at his vest. His parents, Chris Garcia and Aida Alvarez, who were also wearing vests, danced nearby.It was — as designed — impossible to tell who was deaf and who was hearing.But Mr. Zimmerman, who first tested the suits, said he was still hoping for a few more tweaks.“I would like to have it be so good that a beautiful note on violin would make me cry,” he said. “And a funny blast of a trombone would make me laugh.”Katie Van Syckle More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

      by

      Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool.“What did he just say?”Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of hearing.We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50 percent of Americans — and the majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.“It’s getting worse,” said Si Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, Calif., for nearly 40 years. “All of my customers have issues with hearing the dialogue, and many of them use closed captions.”The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested. (More on this later.)The issue is complex because of myriad factors at play. In big movie productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sound, from spoken words to loud gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio has been “down mixed,” or compressed, to carry the sounds through tiny, relatively weak speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at the media production company Optimus.It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, blasting sound away from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.There are also issues specific to streaming. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which must adhere to regulations that forbid them from exceeding specific loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps, Ms. Killion said. That means sound may be wildly inconsistent from app to app and program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then switch to a movie on Netflix, you probably have to repeatedly adjust your volume settings to hear what people are saying.“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Ms. Killion said.Subtitles are far from an ideal solution to all of this, so here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup and speech enhancers — to try.A speaker will helpDecades ago, TV dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It was obvious where the speakers lived on a television — behind a plastic grill embedded into the front of the set, where they could blast sound directly toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or the bottom of the display.“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to present the sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, the speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “They’re too thin, they’re downward and their exits aren’t directed at the audience.”Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging in a separate speaker such as a soundbar, a wide, stick-shaped speaker. I’ve tested many soundbars over the last decade, and they have greatly improved. With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget friendly than a multispeaker surround-sound system, and they are simpler to set up.Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes by plugging it into a power outlet, connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable and using the Sonos app to calibrate the sound for my living room space. It delivered significantly richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few soundbars on the market with a speech enhancer, a button that can be pressed in the Sonos app to make spoken words easier to hear. It made a big difference in helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.”But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer ran into its limits with the jarring colloquialisms of the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t make more fathomable lines like “We’re seeking a girl and a witcher — her with ashen hair and patrician countenance, him a mannerless, blanched brute.”Then again, I’m not sure any speaker could help with that. I left the subtitles on for that one.Dialogue enhancers in appsNot everyone wants to spend more money to fix sound on a TV that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature, called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, you open the language options and choose “English Dialogue Boost: High.” I tested the tool in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the spy thriller with a cast of especially unintelligible, deep-voiced men.With the dialogue boost turned on (and the Sonos soundbar turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I thought the actors had said. Then I rewatched each scene with subtitles on to check my answers.In the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “That’s right, you stuck the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still had the ring on — I thought the two of you were trying to work it out.”Whoops.I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss making plans to get together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I had understood all the words correctly.But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a line that I could not even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of enunciation.In conclusionThe Sonos Arc soundbar was helpful for hearing dialogue without the speech enhancer turned on most of the time for movies and shows. The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, like scenes with very soft-spoken actors, which could be useful for those who are hearing-impaired. For everyone else, the good news is that installing even a cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.Amazon’s dialogue booster was no magic bullet, but it’s better than nothing and a good start. I’d love to see more features like this from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokeswoman said the company had no plans to release a similar tool.My last piece of advice is counterintuitive: Don’t do anything with the sound settings on your TV. Mr. Lewis said that modern TVs have software that automatically calibrate the sound levels for you — and if you mess around with the settings for one show, the audio may be out of whack for the next one.And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles. Those are foolproof. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Dolby Atmos Wants You to Listen Up. (And Down. And Sideways.)

      by

      True believers in the immersive audio format say it could restore a musical appreciation lost to a generation that has come up during the streaming era.After more than 30 years as a producer and engineer, Brad Wood wasn’t sure if he still had a future in music.Wood, a classically trained saxophonist, had gotten his start in Chicago’s early ’90s music scene, helming breakthrough albums for Liz Phair and Veruca Salt, and platinum records for Smashing Pumpkins and Placebo. In 2000, he moved to Southern California, where he thrived for a time — and then merely survived, as the downloading era sank recording budgets just as the brand of guitar rock he specialized in lost cultural relevancy.While many of his colleagues gave up, Wood kept going, working harder while earning less. “I probably got to the point where I was making the same rate as when I started,” he said.Then, in 2021, an emergent technology ushered Wood — and thousands of recording professionals like him — into an unexpected boom time.Over the past two years, Wood has been busy mixing old and new records in Dolby Atmos, an audio format that lets engineers create a listening experience more immersive than traditional stereo by placing sounds around and above the listener. Working for a variety of labels, Wood has done Atmos mixes for the Supremes, the Pogues, Jennifer Lopez, Modest Mouse, Gwen Stefani and Soul Asylum — some 300-plus tracks in total, the equivalent of two dozen albums.“The whole thing has been pretty unexpected and thrilling,” he said.For Dolby, the audio company that developed Atmos, and Apple Music — which has invested heavily in it — the technology could lead to the most dramatic shift in audio in 65 years.“The recording industry went from mono to stereo decades ago, and it didn’t move from there,” John Couling, senior vice president of Dolby Laboratories, said in a phone interview.There have been efforts to convince the public to adopt new advanced technologies in the years since, ‌including Quadraphonic sound in the ’70s ‌and 5.1 surround sound in the ’90s, but with little success. “We’ve changed formats, we’ve changed delivery methods, we’ve changed all sorts of things,” Couling said, “but it was still fundamentally the same sound. Atmos is a completely new experience.”Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple Music, said that his company, which has incentivized record labels to deliver catalog material in Atmos, sees it as way to bring sonic value back to music — something that’s been lost among a whole generation that has come up during the streaming era.“There was no appreciation of the art and work of sound engineers and mixing and mastering,” Schusser said over a video call this spring. “That really pained us. We wanted to fix that.”Today, all three major record labels and hundreds of independents are delivering tracks in Atmos. Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal and Qobuz are the among the 15 streaming services bringing Atmos to 160 countries and over 500 million listeners.“But mention the word ‘Atmos’ to anyone in the general public and they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said the veteran engineer and producer Bob Clearmountain. One of the most respected and influential figures in the recording world, Clearmountain was initially dubious of Atmos’s staying power, but he has come to believe in its future.“Music has become background noise for most people. It’s something in your headphones while you’re out doing other stuff,” he said during a call last month. “When I was a teenager, I used to listen to an album three, four times through just sitting in front of my speakers, entranced.” That way of listening has disappeared, he said, but he’s hopeful that Atmos can bring it back, “if we’re able to get people to understand what it is and hear it the right way.”From the outside, it appears Atmos is entering a critical period that could determine whether it will kick off a sonic revolution or become just another tech lost to time.“The goal is to feel like you’re sitting amongst these musicians as they’re performing,” the producer Brad Wood said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDOLBY ATMOS, INTRODUCED in 2012, was initially developed for movie theaters and the home theater market. Because it offers a wider palette than stereo, and differs from traditional 5.1 and 7.1 channel setups, Atmos allows engineers — typically mixing across a dozen or more speakers — to put sound sources in front, to the side, behind and even above the listener.“When you take sounds and you separate them from each other,” Couling said, “you will be able to hear those sounds independently much more clearly than if they are on top of each other. By creating space, we also create depth and clarity — and we found that’s what content creators really wanted.”For artists like Chic’s founder, Nile Rodgers, immersive audio is the closest thing to the musician’s experience. “When I’m making a record, I’m sitting in a room with the band,” Rodgers said during a video chat, “we’re playing and jamming and what happens is the sound is bathing us. That’s what music sounds like to me.”Listening to Dolby Atmos mixes in a professional recording studio can be a powerful experience. “It’s remarkably seductive,” said Clearmountain, who’s done Atmos projects for Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and others. “I’ve played Atmos tracks for so many people who say, ‘I can never listen to stereo again.’ People have been in tears, moved by what they were hearing. It has an incredible effect.”Opinions among recording professionals on any subject are rarely uniform, and there are some who have reservations about Atmos.Susan Rogers, a longtime engineer for Prince, left the music industry in the late ’90s to become a cognitive neuroscientist. Last fall, Dolby invited her to the company headquarters in San Francisco to listen to a new Atmos mix of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” a track she originally worked on.“As both an engineer and as a psychoacoustician, I have mixed feelings about whether it’s an improvement,” Rogers said in a phone interview.She noted that there are evolutionary and biological reasons that sound sources coming from behind and above listeners can be unsettling or anxiety inducing. She also observed that music is a potent form of communication in large part because the consummatory phase happens entirely in the listener’s head. Having clearer and more sound sources can actually make it harder to know what to pay attention to.“That was what I noticed listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ in Atmos,” Rogers said. “It sounded amazing, but it was more difficult to assemble it into a unified whole in that private place I listen to music. I found it distracting.” Her “knee-jerk reaction was ‘do not want,’” she said. “But over time I may learn to like it.”APPLE MUSIC IS betting heavily that the public will, by and large, come to love Atmos. Although other companies, including Amazon, had flirted with the technology, in 2021 Apple decided to commit itself fully to Atmos, putting its own proprietary and branding spin on the tech, dubbing it “spatial” audio.Strategically, Atmos offers Apple Music a way to further distinguish itself from streaming competitors like Spotify — which has historically ignored high resolution or advanced audio options — and siphon market share from the industry’s dominant music service, YouTube.“We wanted something where people would notice a difference immediately,” said Schusser, the Apple Music executive. “Maybe not 100 percent would love Atmos or spatial audio right away, but everyone would know this sounds different, and the hope is the majority would come to appreciate the upgrade.”Initially, Apple’s biggest challenge was that there was very little Atmos content available. In 2017, R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People” became the first album mixed for Atmos, and over the next few years, several notable Atmos releases — from Elton John, Queen and the Beatles — showcased the format’s possibilities.To achieve its broader aims, Apple needed to make Atmos content both viable and plentiful. It began by partnering with Dolby to encourage recording studios to upgrade to the format. There are now some 800 officially recognized Dolby Atmos studios in over 40 countries, a 350 percent increase in just two years. (Dolby estimates there are two or three times that number of other studios capable of delivering music in Atmos.)Apple Music also drew up wish lists of artists, albums and tracks and presented them to record labels, along with funding and deadlines, to help quickly expand the library of titles available in Atmos. Over the past few years, this effort to refit 50 years of pop music has heralded a rush of work for engineers and mixers, who’ve suddenly found themselves doing volume business in the format.Wood, initially dismissive of learning to work in Atmos, said he changed his mind once he realized the inevitability of its rise. “It was clear that records I’d made were going to get mixed in Atmos,” he said, “and if I didn’t learn how to do it, somebody else would, and I’d be ceding that control.” Wood’s first Atmos mix was for Liz Phair’s “Soberish,” an album he’d originally produced. “And, also, I realized there would be a good payday in learning,” he added.While contemporary pop and hip-hop artists were quick to adopt the format for new releases, convincing veteran rock acts to enter the Atmos fray proved more of a challenge. “The first six months, those artists had a lot of questions,” Schusser said.Some groups, like the Doors, embraced the format, overhauling their entire catalog in Atmos all at once; others, like Fleetwood Mac, have proceeded more cautiously, doing one album at a time. More and more though, top legacy artists have been putting out Atmos mixes with increasing regularity, with recent releases including landmark albums like Pink Floyd’s‌ ‌“The Dark Side of the Moon‌‌” and ‌the Beach Boys’‌ ‌“Pet Sounds.”Given the sheer volume of Atmos catalog work and the still evolving understanding of the format, not all mixes are created equal.“The labels seem to be farming this stuff out and it isn’t always being done with the original artist or production team involved,” Clearmountain said. “I know that’s not always possible. But sometimes what comes back are just bad mixes — or strange mixes, anyway.”Wood — who has done mixes in consultation with the original artists as well as on his own — agrees. “In general, you have to try to put the tracks into a speaker array so it doesn’t sound too jarring or gimmicky,” he said. “The goal is to feel like you’re sitting amongst these musicians as they’re performing. Like all mixing, it’s subjective, and how you approach it really depends on the music itself.”For some artists, transforming old recordings into Atmos has been challenging. Chic recently had its first three albums mixed in the format. “The process took months and months to get right,” Rodgers said. “The team that was working on it, we gave them notes, we went into different rooms, did rough mixes to show them what we were talking about.”For others, the overhaul has been relatively painless and even eye-opening. This past spring, Alicia Keys had eight of her albums mixed for Atmos. In a video interview promoting her catalog overhaul, Keys said that engineers working on her albums “completely reimagined every note, every sound, every instrument, every voice. It sounds like you’ve never heard it before. I mean, I never even heard it like this before. It really is a new experience.”Strategically, Atmos offers Apple Music a way to further distinguish itself from streaming competitors like Spotify,Chad HagenONE OF THE reasons other highly touted surround sound technologies like 5.1 and 7.1 failed to catch on is because they required a specific speaker configuration. Dolby Atmos, however, is scalable and can adapt to a variety of setups.Given its success in the headphones market, Apple has emphasized playback on its AirPods and Beats Fit Pro devices, which all offer a version of the Atmos experience with dynamic head tracking (where the sound shifts along with a user’s movement) in the $200 to $500 range. A number of other manufacturers, including Audeze, RIG, Corsair and LG, also offer Atmos headphones and earbuds.The options for affordable home music systems, ones purpose-built for Atmos audio, have been limited. Amazon and Apple have long offered their own Atmos-enabled smart speakers, but neither really conveyed the full range of sound possible.In March, Sonos introduced a first of its kind sub-$500 speaker, the Era 300, which more successfully packages the Atmos experience into a single compact unit, equipped with a half-dozen drivers that direct sound left, right, forward and upward.The Grammy-winning mixing and mastering engineer Emily Lazar, who helped test and fine tune the Era 300, hopes it will be the start of tech companies bringing more viable Atmos options to market.“No one who’s listened to Atmos in a properly tuned, beautiful-sounding studio can deny what it offers,” she said. “How now can we deliver that in a smaller package so everybody can afford it and have that same kind of experience is going to be key moving forward.”If Atmos does ever achieve critical mass, it might come through automobiles. Most cars come equipped standard with a dozen-plus speakers, making them a natural environment for immersive audio. So far, a handful of major automakers including Mercedes-Benz and Volvo have introduced plans to put Atmos in their vehicles. It’s a market Dolby and Apple both say they are determined to expand further.“But those kind of tech changes don’t happen in a year or two — and that’s really what it’s been so far,” Schusser said. “There’s obviously more work to be done. But we’re all optimistic we’ll get there with Atmos.”In the meantime, recording pros like Wood will keep working and mixing, hoping the Atmos bump will last a little while longer.“I don’t know that I could have written a better chapter for this phase of my career,” he said. “If you told me three years ago, I was going to get paid my day rate to listen and work on some of the greatest recordings in history, I would’ve said, ‘Sign me up — that sounds amazing.’” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

      by

      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafness

      by

      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafnessvia Jessica FloresJessica Flores, a comedian and improv performer, went from hiding her hearing loss to posting YouTube videos about it.I recently spoke with Flores about channelling her lighthearted nature to spread awareness. Here’s what she told me → More