Rapt/Wrapped Listening: The Aesthetics of “Surround Sound”

This essay is prompted by “surround sound,” the sonic results of which have been evident in cinemas since the late 1970s and the encoding for which, in the form of Dolby 5.1 on the soundtracks of DVDs, since the turn of the century has been fairly ubiquitous. By way of background, the essay deals in turn with the physical nature of three-dimensional listening and with the history of stereophonic sound as manifest both in the cinema and on LP recordings. More to the point, the essay deals with the aesthetic differences (not just perceptual but also affective) between listening to three-dimensional sounds in real life situations and listening to re-creations of those sounds, via a Dolby system or otherwise, in the privacy and comfort of one’s home. Playing on the homophonic adjectives in its title, the essay reflects on why sometimes we give more rapt attention to artificial versions of “surround sound” than to the genuine stereophonic sound in which we are literally wrapped almost on a daily basis.

Bigger Than Life

In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.

3-D sound field reproduction with reverberation control on surround sound system by combining parametric and electro-dynamic loudspeakers

Recently, with the development of video technology, 3-D sound field reproduction systems that can provide a high presence have attracted attention. Conventional systems with electro-dynamic loudspeakers have a problem that the sound image lacks sharpness when constructing a narrow sound image. To solve this problem, we utilize a parametric array loudspeaker which has sharp directivity by the straightness of ultrasounds. Parametric array loudspeakers can produce sharper sound images due to the sharper directivity and lower reverberation compared with electro-dynamic loudspeakers. However, it is difficult to represent reverberation by parametric array loudspeakers. In this paper, we propose a method for 3-D sound field reproduction to achieve both the sharp images and reverberation presence by combing parametric array loudspeakers and electro-dynamic loudspeakers in surround sound system. In the proposed method, sharp sound images are rendered by parametric array loudspeakers and the reverberation presence is provided by electro-dynamic loudspeakers, emitting reverberation signals synthesized with a reverberation control filter. The reverberation control filter is adaptively designed to reproduce the reverberation time and the direct-to-reverberation ratio of the target sound field in other environments. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the reproducing the sharp sound image with some reverberation presence.

Teaching Reading Skills in “Surround Sound”

Considering that Japanese university reading classes are upwards of 100 minutes, EFL teachers need to be equipped with a variety of “active learning” methods to keep their students engaged and focused on specific reading skills, content comprehension, and vocabulary development. However, some Japanese students might be more familiar with a top-down, passive learning approach. Using the principles of Auster and Wylie’s (2006) four dimensions of the teaching process (context setting, class preparation, class delivery, and continuous improvement), surround-sound pedagogy (SSP) was designed by the author to increase student engagement and motivation in university-level EFL reading classes by stimulating active learning. This paper provides specific strategies on how to support student vocabulary and content comprehension/ retention, confidence when reading aloud, and accuracy in pronunciation/connected speech. 日本の大学ではリーディングの授業が100分以上に及ぶことから、EFLの教師は、生徒の読む力や理解力、語彙力の向上に向けて、様々な「アクティブラーニング」の手法を身につける必要がある。しかし、日本の学生の中にはトップダウンの受動的な学習方法に慣れている学生も存在する。Auster and Wylie（2006）のティーチングプロセスの4次元の原則（文脈設定、授業準備、授業実施、継続的改善）を用い、著者はサラウンドサウンド教育法（SSP）を考案した。これは能動的学習を促すことで、大学レベルのEFLリーディングの授業における学生の取り組み方とやる気を向上させるものである。本稿では、学生の語彙や内容の理解・保持、音読時の自信、発音・連結音声の正確さをサポートする方法について、具体的な戦略を示している。

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History

In evaluating the success of twenty-first-century applications of surround sound technology, the popular press often fails to take into consideration the powerful role that history plays in their design. Dolby Atmos for Cinema (2012 –) has been marketed as groundbreaking and become a gold standard in cinema sound. Conceived of as a means to create a “platform” that would reach across the movie theatre, home theatre, music, and virtual reality for maximal profit, however, Atmos was always designed to move beyond it. Discussing both Atmos for Cinema and Atmos for Music (2016–), and drawing on first-hand interviews with industry insiders, this chapter situates Dolby’s platform into a longer history of multimedia surround technologies, and argues that its contribution to that history is first, in its reflection of the underrecognized hybridity of surround sound’s past, and second, to think of surround sound as a space to physically move through.

Feasibility analysis of letting multi-channel surround sound system into college singing class

The multi-channel surround system used for multimedia teaching can bring more powerful auditory effects to the audience, and can fully mobilize students’ interest and enthusiasm in learning. Such as music arrangement, Yunnan musical instruments, the sound characteristics of national music and national musical instruments, and the sound processing knowledge of music processing. You can quickly master basic music arrangement, the sound characteristics of musical instruments, and the knowledge of mixing and processing music. Achieve better teaching results. Most multimedia devices on the market, with the music and sound effects, a high compression mono or stereo transmission. This mono or stereo transmission with a high compression ratio is very low quality. Since audio is far less powerful than visual impact, and the capacity of the disc used to store audio is small, people tend to focus on visual information processing, but ignore the importance of audio. Multi-channel surround sound technology has received more and more attention in the teaching practice of film and television colleges, but it is also affected by various factors such as venue facilities. This has caused bottlenecks in teaching in this field and has greatly affected the teaching effect. This paper designs and constructs a mobile multi-channel surround sound teaching system from a practical perspective. As part of a multimedia teaching device, try to use the best digital surround sound system for today’s audio reproduction. The feasibility of entering the digital surround sound system into the multimedia teaching classroom is analyzed. Better promote students’ correct understanding of audio and use modern high-tech digital technology to spread real art.