Malcolm Owen
Apple appears to be rolling out the Apple Music Spatial Audio feature right after the WWDC 2021 keynote ends on Monday, with a video teasing a special event.
Apple announced Spatial Audio as a new addition to Apple Music alongside Lossless hi-fidelity music streaming in May, with the rollout to users said at the time to occur in June. It appears that for Spatial Audio at least, it will be arriving very soon.
An Apple Music video posted to Reddit has been discovered, called "Introducing Spatial Audio." The video invites viewers to "tune in at 12pm PT on June 7 to watch this special event," which follows after the opening keynote of WWDC 2021.
Spatial Audio promises an immersive audio experience, built on top of Dolby Atmos. Rather than using fixed audio channels, Spatial Audio also takes into account the user's head movements, allowing the music sources to stay in positions relative to the user's body.
Apple previously said thousands of songs in its Apple Music catalog were available to listen to with Spatial Audio, with the number growing over time.
While Apple hasn't laid out what hardware is required for Spatial Audio to function, it is likely that it will need AirPods Pro or AirPods Max at a bare minimum.
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26 Comments
So excited!!
Maybe ATV on HomePod where Dolby Atmos is now present….just hoping
I’m hoping they drop AM Lossless with it as well. Impatiently waiting.
Will this event start right after the WWDC keynote or will we have to open another stream? I ask because I will be watching the keynote on my TV and it would seem weird if I have to close out of one stream to open another.
“Spatial Audio promises an immersive audio experience, built on top of Dolby Atmos. Rather than using fixed audio channels, Spatial Audio also takes into account the user's head movements, allowing the music sources to stay in positions relative to the user's body.”
Based on what’s written here and in the linked explainer article, I think AI misunderstands what spatial audio is. The short end result of that is that I sincerely doubt that spatial audio for Apple Music will involve tracking head movements as it does when watching a movie with surround sound on your iPhone.
This is because when watching a movie with spatial audio in your earbuds, the gyroscopes and sensors are orienting the surround sound to the device’s screen, not the listener’s body. The purpose of this is so that the sound of, say, an airplane flying overhead from behind your right shoulder and into the action on the screen will stay oriented to that screen even if you momentarily turn your head in reaction to hearing the airplane approach. This is a very cool effect, but it’s accomplished both with measurements from gyroscopes and accelerometers, along with some reliable assumptions about how you and your iPhone are positioned when you start watching.
When listening to music in your earbuds with no associated video on your iPhone, you’re a lot more likely to have the phone in your pocket or left on some furniture nearby. As a result, measuring your earbuds’ orientation to your iPhone becomes less than meaningless. The sensors in your AirPods Pro can detect motion, but as there are no sensors on your body, AirPods can’t determine on their own which way your head is turned. As such, there would be no way to consistently track head movements within an audio-only surround sound music track, without either assuming a listener is looking straight forward at the beginning of a track (an incorrect assumption much of the time) or by requiring an active user interaction confirming their starting position when pressing “play.”
So spatial audio for Apple Music is going to mean that there is indeed a three-dimensional sound field played back to you in your earbuds or earphones, whether from a 5.1 audio mix or from a Dolby Atmos source. It will be amazing. It almost certainly will not, however, involve tracking head movements for audio-only music. The surround sound field will stay oriented to your two ears, just as stereo does now. “Spatial audio” itself just refers to the technology that enables three-dimensional sound to be played back through two earphones or earbuds. The technological feat here is simulating the surround effect achieved with a much older recording concept known as binaural audio.