The venue opens this month in San Francisco.
Ghostly International veteran Christopher Willits has announced Horizon, a new album recorded with 3D spatial sound design.
Though it’s grown increasingly popular in electronic music as “3D audio”, spatial sound design is actually based around a century-old technique called “binaural recording” and software that allows artists to place sounds anywhere in the field of hearing. It’s a powerful effect that you can hear on Horizon’s ambient opener ‘Comet’ with headphones or in a venue specially equipped for spatial sound technology.
If you’re currently fumbling with headphones, wondering where you can find that kind of venue, Willits has you covered. On April 29, his San Francisco spatial audio space, Envelop at the Midway, opens following a successful crowd-funding campaign.
The venue is named after Willits’s spatial audio platform Envelop and boasts “a 28.4 channel Ambisonic sound system that can position sound elements above, below, in front of, behind, and completely around an audience.” As he puts it, “the entire room is an instrument.”
Horizon is out May 19 via Ghostly. Look at the artwork and tracklist below.
Tracklist:
01. ‘Comet’
02. ‘Return’
03. ‘Rising’
04. ‘Light and Dark’
05. ‘Simplicity’
06. ‘Rotation’
07. ‘Waipio’
08. ‘Two’
Read next: Adventures in the Next Dimension: How spatial sound design is opening a new frontier
