The beginning of augmenting sound reality in public spaces

A startup called Spatial today unveiled its first line of products focused on creating audio experiences that are engaging, interactive and automated. The products themselves are a bit complicated to explain, but the result is simple: ambient and interactive sound for public spaces that is easy to create and more dynamic than the usual tracks.

Although Spatial has a consumer offering, customers are likely to be businesses. Think of hotels that want a different sound experience in their lobby, theme parks that want to develop sound faster for their spaces, brand activations or AR experiences (National Geographic is an investor). Think about how fine the canned sound in the zoo is often; Spatially wants to fix it.

In a demo a few weeks ago, I was sitting in a room and heard the sounds of a forest around me, with birds chirping in one place and then moving to another – until a dragon flew overhead and everyone got a little scared away while.

It’s honestly nothing special: sound in space is simple. What is complicated is the engine that created all the sound. Spatial’s goal is to make the design of personal sounds for a space easy and to make the sound take place generatively instead of on a loop or cut. There are three chapters to it.

First, there’s Spatial Studio, a Mac app that’s a kind of unholy mention of Logic and Unreal Engine. It defines a 3D space where users can place audio objects – sounds they have created themselves or pulled from Spatial’s library. Users can even inject live sound as an object – say if they want to record the sound of the nearby ocean in the foyer or just drive a Sonos stream.

What is special about Spatial is that the sound objects behaved. A bird may move along a predetermined path (with a degree of randomness so that it does not become boring) or an ocean tide may appear at certain times of the day, for example. These sound objects can also respond – to each other or to something happening in the right space.

The second part of Spatial’s system makes all the dynamic sound objects a real sound that you can hear in a space. For that, he uses Mac minis (or, for business customers, Linux) to use a real-time audio engine called Spatial Reality. It will need input from different sensors if needed, or the small sound world will simply let go – and because things in that small sound world have different behaviors, it will sound different all the time. Spatial has also created an iPhone app for more direct interaction.

You would think that the third part is the speakers, but this is actually the third trick of Spatial: it can work with any speaker setup. Spatial’s engine serves as an abstraction layer that is aware of the position of the speakers in the room and automatically adjusts the sound to ensure the correct 3D position of the sound. Instead of a strict set of placement rules, Spatial can work with what you have.

Michael Plitkins, one of the co-founders, tells me that he naturally believes that depositing sound on a static track is backward. It is better, he says, to let the computers determine it in real time based on what they know about the speaker system. As the product currently stands, Spatial does not care about the real-time tuning of the sound in the room. It will work with any speaker setup, but users will need to program in what they have in the Spatial Studio app.

In the beginning, Spatial’s main competition was a combination of Muzak for public spaces and the custom tools that Disney Imagineers use for the sound in their theme parks. It can also be appealing to some hobbies – part of the inspiration for the venture was Plitkins’ desire to create a soundscape in his own backyard. I also had a demo of the space, complete with cave sounds under the deck, so authentic that it was awful.

Whoever the customers are, it probably won’t sell easily. (And launching a product that is primarily intended for public spaces while a pandemic is still going on is another challenge.) Dynamically created rain and bird song sounds no different than a static soundtrack if you just few minutes do not listen.

But during a lengthy interview in a conference room where the team outlined the in-outs of their product, they turned off the cabin in the forest sound that played softly the entire time. The silence was strangely stressful, as conference rooms usually are.