This is the “world’s first” phone call made using spatial audio
Spatial audio isn’t just for music.
oh look, a feature literally no one asked for or needs.
90% of the features in your daily life started as something no one asked for or needed. I remember people saying this about touch screens.
I don't necessarily endorse the viewpoint of Noel Gallagher but it is pretty funny.
Can't wait to experience the tech support call center scams in Dolby Atmos.
We're calling about your cars extended warranty
In THX certified 7.2.1 surround straight out of Bangalore.
Kitboga SURROUND SOUND? Sign me up
All I want is some kind of audio processing so people can’t tell I’m on the toilet.
It's easier to redirect attention than to completely obscure something.
"I'M JUST STRUGGLING TO OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER! PAY NO MIND TO MY SOUNDS OF DISTRESS!" (Horrible farting sounds ensue)
Foolproof.
I enjoy how "spatial audio" makes it sound all fancy, even though it's just stupid stereo.
It's not, I assure you. It uses psychoacoustic properties of audio to simulate actual surround sound. I've been using it in gaming for years. You can literally hear when an enemy is behind you vs in front of you, and anywhere in the 360° around you. You can easily pinpoint their location in your head.
Pixel Buds Pro have this same kind of programming and you can enable it when watching surround sound content on your phone. You can even have it play regular audio but make it sound like it's coming from the direction of the phone. When you turn your head, the audio follows the phone and it sounds like the audio is coming from the phone in 3D, not just panned L or R in stereo. (I haven't played with this much, and I hope I'm not misremembering that last part which iPhone also has.)
Here's a computer generated example using these techniques. Headphones are required! Listen to this with ordinary headphones with no additional spatial processing enabled.
To my ears, it sounds like the 3 channels of the source audio are little spheres rotating around the top of my head like a halo. The music sounds distinctly different when it's behind me or in front of me. The distance away from my head is not far, though.
A technique like this will never be perfect, and this is not the best example I've heard. The best would be using my Logitech gaming headset in a game. It's not perfect because everyone's ears are shaped differently, and your brain learns the microtonal differences which your specific ears cause as sound echo's around your outer ear and ear canal. This might be why I hear these music examples as above my head while others might hear it revolve directly around their ears or perhaps a little lower than their ears.
I enjoy how ignorant people who don't understand a technology dismiss is with snark and get upvoted by others. Wait, what's the opposite of enjoy?
It's like how religious fundies with little education make fun of our best scientific theories with arguments that boil down to "I'm ignorant, so I don't believe this". Congratulations on being on the same level.
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I listened to you link after commenting and it is absolutely an accurate representation of basic Spatial Audio for normal headphones! Thank you for sharing. I went through with Spatial Audio off and it astounded me, then was surprised when Spatial Audio ON made it less impressive. It’s because on Apple devices, it has the sound come more from where the video is coming from. For regular music, it doesn’t do that.
Nah, I'm not ignorant, just cynical.
I make digital music myself. I've had that moment myself, where for a quick moment I thought, surely there could be some 'proper' way of rotating an audio source around your head.
And well, there is not, it is always just an effect thing.
As in, even in reality, our hearing is literally stereo, because we've got precisely two eardrums, two membranes that do the detection. Yes, the ear flaps shape the sound, but you can do the same shaping with just effects. Make it a bit more muffled when it comes from behind, for example, and hope you don't need to also portray that something muffled comes from the front. And of course, always slap a heavy virtualizer effect on there.
In the end, it's smokes and mirrors that our brain then interprets as something spatial. I don't have a problem with smokes and mirrors. I do still find it humorous, though.
Progress mate. We are firmly in diminishing returns territory.
Spatial audio is more like smart stereo. It's all the 3+ speaker system methods of positional audio that are stupid.
Nokia implemented stereo sound? Wow, welcome to 1881.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it'll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you're not holding it next to one ear, they're still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
If only they had developed some kind of companion technology that connected to the phone and directed separate audio channels to each of your ears. Eh, such a specialized device could never gain widespread adoption if stereo phone calls were the only practical use case.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it'll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you're not holding it next to one ear, they're still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
No, lots of (probably most) phones and other devices has stereo speakers.
Either way headphones are most often used for this (you know like the thumbnail)
This was true for TVs until it wasn't.
Edit: apparently some young whippersnappers don't know TVs used to be mono before they were stereo, and now some TVs even have spatial sound.
i mean, people have innovated in the areas they care already.
no one really cares that much about audio on phone calls. as long as they're understandable.
people added video because it adds to the communication. spatial audio will not. it will only become common if one or two of these mega corps decide to shoehorn it into ever device. not because people actually want it or care.
might be a lucrative patent if we ever get holograms though
For years we invested in better microphones and noise canceling to CLEARLY hear the closest / primary speaker and remove all other noise and distractions.
Now introducing, car noise. Get immerses with the kids fighting in the back seat in surround sound..
No important conference call is complete without you providing your weekly update while your dog licks his balls on the way to the vet for everyone to hear.
Useless.
Incorrect. This will better train LLMs since they can detect distinct speakers/sounds more easily and thus applying the proper metadata tags and profile information at a more accurate clip.
All so they can deliver more ads!
I wish it was only useless:(
<.< I’m assuming this is a joke, but feel the need to point out to the ones who don’t realize… LLMs aren’t trained on audio recordings.
Not everything that will be useful has an immediately obvious benefit.
The only benefit this has is to those who will upcharge to use it. It's pointless crap nobody asked for.
If it improves video calls and regular calls, why not? I can definitely see room for improvement in audio quality when calling and would be happy to have a better experience.
At least in the United States, when you call somebody on the same carrier as you, you get that HD quality thing, and that improves the call quality a bunch versus the standard 8KB phone call. However, even still, when you call somebody on another carrier, you generally don't get that high quality call. So it would be nice to get those high quality calls between carriers for everybody before moving on.
Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn't. Not saying it's a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn't going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.
So instead of playing bad music, I can get ASMR while I'm on hold with my bank?
Finally, ASMR phone calls.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It placed the call over a cellular network using the 3GPP Immersive Video and Audio Services (IVAS) codec, allowing callers to hear “sound spatially in real-time.”
The IVAS codec is part of 5G Advanced, an upcoming upgrade to 5G networks that could offer faster speeds, improved energy efficiency, more accurate cellular-based positioning, and more.
Currently, all phone calls made over a cellular network are monophonic, meaning audio is compressed into a single channel.
Spatial audio, on the other hand, makes it seem like sounds are coming from different directions as they’re delivered through multiple channels.
The IVAS codec could enable spatial audio in a “vast majority” of smartphones with at least two microphones, Nokia tells Reuters.
But, as pointed out by Reuters, we likely won’t see the more immersive audio and video calls on our cellular networks for a few more years.
The original article contains 228 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 38%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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"A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular"