Stereo headphones required!

I was feeling adventurous last night. I was making progress with my remake of the Outset Island theme from Wind Waker, when I imagined how cool it would be to extrude the instruments into virtual 3D space like I did with ‘Upular’ a while back. I busted out the dummy head microphones and spread my speakers across the room. In Ableton Live, I routed each instrument to one of the 4 speakers, and experimented angling and positioning them to get believable results. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but I’m very satisfied with how it turned out. Below is a screenshot of the composition in Ableton.

While I was at it, I did the same thing with a track I’m finishing soon called Foley Moley, a composition of sounds recorded around my house.

The recordings are made using a moving custom dummy head fitted with silicon ears and binaural microphones, while tracks in Ableton are routed through 4 studio monitors that are positioned around the room.