First-Ever AES Immersive Audio Academy to Explore Emerging Technologies

	Technology and solutions in Immersive and Binaural Audio to be explored in the first-ever AES Immersive Audio Academy event, taking place Tuesday, February 11.

Registration is now open for the Audio Engineering Society's first-ever AES Immersive Audio Academy (taking place Thursday, February 11 from 12:00pm to 9:00pm ET), a one-day online event that launches a series focusing on the latest production and emerging technologies in immersive and binaural audio. The program's Workshop and Master Class sessions will take on diverse applications of Immersive Audio production -- from live events, to gaming, movies, and beyond -- and participants will receive a certificate of achievement after completing the sessions. The event is sponsored by Genelec (Gold Partner), Dolby Atmos (Silver Partner), and Bronze Partners, Fraunhofer, L-Acoustics, New Audio Technology and Sound Particles. Registration is just $49 for AES members ($99 non-member), with members also receiving access to on-demand playback of the Academy sessions.

The Audio Engineering Society has been a driving force in the development of immersive audio technology and standards, serving as a hub for the exchange of information and ideas throughout continued development in the industry. The AES Immersive Audio Academy will open with "Introduction & Immersive Audio Past, Present & Future" with event co-chairs Steve Martz and Andres Mayo, followed by the Genelec partner session "Immersive Audio for Music: A practical session to develop from stereo to immersive." "Immersive Audio for Live Events" follows, with insight to the challenges and opportunities in immersive sound reinforcement hosted by Etienne Corteel and Scott Sugden of L-Acoustics.

Further implementation of immersive audio practices will be discussed by Scott Selfon of Facebook Reality Labs in the session "Audio Futures: Technologies for Games," a look at the immersive worlds of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality and their implications for current games, both screen- and head-mounted-display-based. The following session, "Immersive in Recording / Conversion to Dolby Atmos," will take an in-depth look at the GRAMMY-winning album Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? by Fantastic Negrito (Xavier Dphrepaulezz), who will take part in the discussion, along with the album's engineer, Nahuel Bronzini, and mastering engineer Michael Romanowski, who handled the Atmos mixing and mastering.

The AES Immersive Audio Academy's featured Workshop and Masterclass session -- "Producing High Quality Immersive Audio" -- follows, presenting an intensive hands-on three-hour session unveiling secrets of 360 audio production, hosted by Andres Mayo (@360MusicLab) with Brian Glasscock (Sennheiser) and Achim Fell (Dear Reality). Attendees will learn to capture and mix 3D audio using object-oriented solutions and will be able to create immersive content suitable for a variety of applications, such as live concerts, studio recordings, advertising, gaming, VR, AR, e-sports, and more. Mayo will conduct a drawing for at the end of the Masterclass, giving registrants the opportunity to win an AVID ProTools license.

The afternoon concludes with a look at "Immersive in Movies," with John Kellogg and Brian Slack of Xperi / DTS, who will demonstrate a system whereby an immersive audio mix can be acoustically encoded into a 5.1, then decoded back to an immersive environment, allowing for a single delivery of 5.1 audio suited for use in any sound field, including mono, stereo, 5.1, 7.1, or immersive, as well as speaker and headphone virtualization.

Register now at aesshow.com/immersive, and make plans to join the first event in AES's series dedicated to immersive audio and related technologies.