Visit an Audio Installation That Surrounds You With Sound

[Narrator] In a quiet corner of San Francisco,

nestled among the warehouses and the

old ship building docks far from downtown,

some artists have constructed a

temple of sound called Envelop.

On the surface, Envelop is just a room,

about 45 feet long and 20 feet wide

with a kick-ass surround sound system.

There are stacks of speakers arranged

all around you, below you, and above you.

It's a place where you can go and

listen to music in a fully immersive

360-degree environment.

But as an idea, Envelop is bigger

than just the one room.

My name is Christopher Willits.

I'm an artist and musician based in San Francisco.

I'm also the Executive Director of Envelop,

and we develop spatial audio listening spaces

and also open-source and free software tools.

[Narrator] That free software

Christopher is talking about is

the core of what the Envelop crew does.

They've created their own plug-in

for music creation apps that lets musicians

mix their songs, not just in stereo,

but all around the listener in a full sphere.

Among sound designers, this technique

of mixing sound is called ambisonics, or spatial audio.

For years, we've been listening

to stereo, and that's incredible.

However, it's not composed to be

moving around an audience.

It's really just coming at you from one direction.

So, spatial audio allows a composer

to use space as another part of that music.

It allows an audience to have a

shared experience of the sound

that's very similar to the way

that we experience sound every day,

which is in three dimensions all around us.

[Narrator] Envelop at The Midway

has 32 speakers around the room,

and when you stand in the middle,

or anywhere really, you can feel sound

filling the whole space.

Drums spin around you, and low drone notes buzz behind you.

High frequency effects fizz and bubble on all sides.

It's pretty far out.

But you don't need 32 speakers to

listen to a performance created with Envelop.

The system is designed to plug into

any speaker array, whether you've got

150 speaker bins in a huge room or

just a pair of headphones.

Envelop is infinitely scalable.

So, what we're seeing here is a representation

of a virtual sphere from a bird's-eye view.

This one channel's a stereo channel.

There's a left and a right side.

This is the phantom center, and we can

move this all around that sphere.

We can also make it go up or down within the space.

And also make it move away from the listener

or very close, and I'll have it be

right inside the middle of the space.

So, anything that's playing back

within this Ableton Live track is gonna be told

where to go within the virtual sphere with these

coordinates that I'm controlling right here.

[Narrator] Part of Envelop's mission

is to encourage musicians to start

mixing with their plug-in, but also,

they're trying to get venues to adopt

the platform and install the equipment

necessary to host their own ambisonic happenings.

Because what good is a crazy spatial audio

freakout without a proper space to hear it in?

This project started in a lot of ways,

it's just kind of like technological

solution of how can we make spatial audio

more accessible to people?

You know, how can we make the music

of our dreams, and what we're realizing is

the real connection to people is with each other.

There's a social, emotional connection

that's happening that's really

the main dividend that we're seeing.

[Narrator] It really is a unique experience

listening to a piece of music inside Envelop.

Christopher is a well-respected composer and musician.

He makes his own ambient electronic music,

and he played a few of his tracks

for me over Envelop's system.

Walking around the room while the songs

were playing, it didn't really sound like the

music was coming from the speakers around me.

The music was just part of the room.

And of course, spatial audio is

a big component of VR and 360 video.

Musicians and sound designers could even

use Envelop to make an ambisonic mix

for VR experience that could be

played back in a pair of headphones

or in a big room with a dozen speakers.

We're working with a few different

VR partners right now on how we can

start to incorporate live performance

with the VR, how we can incorporate

where visuals and audio are connecting

with our software, and then also

their live, real-time VR renders.

So that's, yeah, there's a whole

lot to explore there.

[Narrator] Spatial audio and ambisonics

have been around for a long time.

You might remember quadriphonic

mixes of LPs in the 1970s.

But it's still a growing field, so Envelop

is making its code free and open-source.

It's really a core intention for this

whole project to be a non-profit

and for us to have open-source tools.

We feel that we really need to do

our best to get this out there

just as much as possible.

Our mission is really to get

the sound out there in the right way,

which is spatial, which is three-dimensional.