New ZR-1 Firmware v1.2 has been released. The new firmware introduces the following features:

• The POWER OFF button has to be pressed for at least 3 seconds to turn off the device. This improvement protects user from unexpected and unwanted shutdown.
• Stopping the recording process is signalized by the blinking red REC LED light. It informs user about processing of the latest recording.
• General improvements and minor bugs fixes for better stability of the whole system.

ZR-1 firmware upgrade procedure

The ZR-1 firmware can be updated with specially prepared files provided by ZYLIA. To perform the firmware update, the user is required to upload the provided update files to a USB flash drive. The procedure is as follows:

1. Download the bin from the link provided by ZYLIA.
2. Upload the provided file to a USB flash drive with FAT32 file system and at least 4GB of free space.
3. It is recommended that during the update procedure the ZR-1 should be connected to the external power adapter supplying 5V at 2.5A. The device should be also turned off.
4. Remove the SD Card from the slot and connect the USB flash drive to the ZR-1 USB socket.
5. Turn on the device while simultaneous pressing and holding PLAY and REC buttons. Release the buttons after around 5 seconds and wait until REC, SD CARD and GAIN LEDs light up. After the three LEDs turn off, ON/OFF LED will change the color to purple indicating that the firmware update process has started.
6. The process may last around 5 minutes. When the update ends, the ZR-1 will power off by itself.
7. Now you can turn your ZR-1 recorder on.

Zylia: What is your background?

​Florian Grond: I am an artist and researcher with a particular interest in audio technology and sound art. Due to my natural science background, I have always been curious about new technology trends, and my artistic side tries to put technology to good use for topics that capture my imagination. In recent years, many of the art and research projects I was involved in had to do with how immersive sound solutions can help us connect with new or unfamiliar perspectives and help translate them to a broader public. To give two examples, I have conceived and implemented in the past a multi-speaker soundscape simulator for urban planners in Montreal, so that they can better experience and understand the impact of noise pollution in public spaces. I have also investigated with blind literary scholar Dr. Piet Devos binaural recordings as a means to capture the immersiveness of soundscapes and to use these recordings as a point of departure for a conversation on how blind people experience and navigate their environment. 

Zylia: How would you describe Ambisonics technology?

​Florian Grond: With my science background, I was always intrigued by the underlying theoretical concepts. Still, I also like that for first-order Ambisonics, you can practically understand it as an extension of the MS recording technique. I think it is this dual perspective as an artist and researcher, having something palpable and concrete but also something that has a solid theoretical foundation. 
But for someone working with sound, the key question is, of course, what does it sound like? First-order recordings give you a great sense of envelopment. Still, only recent advances in affordable higher-order microphone arrays as spearheaded by ZYLIA and the ZM-1 make Ambisonics interesting for spatial sound recordings and reproduction. Another important aspect is that we see more and more plugin collections that target multichannel signals and, more specifically, the b-format. So, everyone working with Ambisonics will soon enjoy many of the tools they are used to for traditional audio formats.
One of my favourite sound programming environments for creative coding and prototyping is SuperCollider, and some years ago, I decided to implement higher-order Ambisonics for this platform based on the Faust library ambitools by Pierre Lecomte. I am pleased to see that artists and sound creatives are increasingly using this library in many projects.    

Zylia: You had the opportunity to work with the ZYLIA 6DoF VR / AR Set. What do you think about such technology and approach for 6dof audio recording and processing?

Florian Grond: The 6DoF VR / AR Set is undoubtedly a unique tool, and what excites me from a research perspective is that it opens up a field of possible applications where many new things wait to be discovered. One of the things that impressed me from the start, was how effortless 171 channels of 24 bit 48 kHz streamed into one single laptop over the USB interface when we tested the 6DoF set here at McGill University in the sound recording department.
The 6DoF VR / AR Set will also help bring the technology of various sectors together, gaming, AR VR, sound recording so that 6DoF recordings can be distributed and experienced correctly. I think it is an exciting moment because the technology is stable and mature so that innovators can dive right into it. By being brand new, it creates opportunities to discover new fields of applications and to define the field of immersive audio. I am curious to see in which ways we will be able to experience 6Dof soon: Will it be through game engines or maybe even over the internet in the browser?

Zylia: How does this solution differ from others available on the market? What is its potential?

​Florian Grond: Several key features set the 6DoF VR / AR Set apart from any other solution. First, as a 3rd order microphone array, the ZM-1 provides a high spatial resolution and captures the information of the diffuse field accurately. The second aspect is that the ZM-1 is not only a microphone but also a USB audio interface; this means that the 6DoF VR / AR Set can be relatively easily extended with more microphones. If you had analogue equipment, the numbers of channels of your audio interface would limit the nodes in your 6DoF grid. Of course, you might find a workaround with complex audio networks, but it needs to be practical too.
Third, ZYLIA has implemented an excellent interpolation algorithm of the b-format audio streams. While 6DOF interpolation has been developed in the past years, this is the first time, results of this research have translated into a practical application.    

Zylia: How can this solution be used in different projects? How would you recommend using it? 

Florian Grond: I am convinced the 6DoF VR / AR Set, will see many different uses: Navigable sound recordings of orchestras, as the ones we are working on right now, are an exciting field of applications. The music event industry, in general, will likely enjoy working with 6DoF for the immersive broadcasting of events to a fanbase, much larger than the audience in place. The 6DoF VR / AR Set will also find applications in sports event broadcasting. In the game industry, 6DoF will complement the object audio approach in situations where you need a rich atmosphere and where not all sound sources are necessarily visible, such as e.g. in forests or urban soundscapes, here 6DoF can create a sonic richness at a fraction of the computing power. I can also see small scale versions of the 6DoF VR / AR set being used in teleconferencing situations for large boardrooms.  There are plenty of applications for rapid prototyping of urban soundscape design as well as academic research. For instance, research on how to capture and document complex in situ sound works as well as room acoustics where multiple distributed room impulse responses can be recorded from only one source.   

Immersive arts are a constantly evolving and developing part of Art branch, which in principle, has a simple definition — it’s the creation of a world around the person in a way that makes them feel part of and inside of it. In practice, the label of immersive art touches on everything from illusory world-building to simply including a piece of interactivity within a larger, traditional art show. In that description, to be labeled “immersive art” the only requirement is that an audience no longer exists as a passive group of onlookers. Viewers become “participants” and no two people experience the same thing. This can be done in almost any medium of art. 
​
Our ZYLIA Brand Ambassador – Przemysław Danowski is highly involved in creating different immersive art experiences. He’s a spatial and algorithmic audio designer and producer, working at Sound Engineering Department in Fryderyk Chopin University of Music (Warsaw, Poland) and a sound design consultant in Visual Narratives Laboratory (vnLab) at the Film School in Łódź. His fields of interest are spatial audio, sound in game engines (Unreal Engine 4, Unity3D, FMOD, Wwise), sound for VR/AR, procedural, and generative sound (Max MSP, pd, Supercollider, etc.). Interested in audio/video codecs, compression, authoring, and streaming. He is also a director and producer of immersive music documentaries.

Z: What are you most proud of in your work?
PD: I’m really proud when I see my successes of my students, and the biggest success for myself now is being a part of an artistic group with my colleagues from the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw. This is why my teaching is focused on connecting students from both schools that I am working with. Being able to contribute to the works of a talented team is the most satisfying thing.

Z: Can you reveal any tricks or tips for beginners in the field of immersive art?
PD: Yes. First - networking. Do networking! Gather knowledge from people and share your knowledge with people. Second – experiment and try every tool that is available. Read the documentation! (RTFM! ;-) Don’t give up when something isn’t working – ask for help. Find workarounds and again – share your experiences with the community.

Z: What do you think is the future of 3D audio recording? What technological changes can occur or are already taking place in the industry?

PD: There is this gap between hardware and software now. There is a lot of great free or inexpensive software for 3D audio. On the other hand, the equipment is very expensive and it has a small assortment. I hope that it will change and with the mass adoption of immersive formats and the hardware for 3D audio will become more diverse and affordable.

I believe that a big part of the production of audio/video will take place in a virtual world or extended realities rather than on flat screens or in physical studios. I think that in near future avatar equipment will be something that will replace currently known software. There is a big shift coming with the cloud architecture – you will not need the computing power onboard. All the computing will be done in the cloud so the user devices will be just terminals. That will bring mass adoption XR, VR, and 3D audio along with it. 

Z: Which industries can benefit from spatial audio and immersive solutions?

PD: Spatial audio will be an integral part of every industry, because XR will be the interface for all of the IT, and IT is now a big part of every industry that I know.

Z: You had the opportunity to get familiar with the ZYLIA 6DoF VR/AR Set. What do you think about such technology and approach for 6DoF audio recording and processing?

PD: I think that this is the beginning of a whole new era for sound. Volumetric audio and video - this is not sci-fi, it’s real and it will become a big part of the entertainment and art industry in the next years. 

Z: How does this solution differ from others available on the market? What is its potential?

PD: There are countless possible applications for this I will not even try to list all of them. For me, it is a great medium for capturing theater, opera, concerts, exhibitions, sports. It’s like sampling reality in 3D. It is very easy to apply. You don’t need so much “handcraft” work as in object audio to have a 3D soundscape. You just apply adequate resolution, that is how many sampling points – microphones – you will apply per area. And it doesn’t need to be uniform. You can decide what you are sampling with high resolution and which parts will be more generalized. I believe that it is also more efficient in terms of needed resources. It’s easy to plan. I am really looking forward to doing some experiments with it. 

Z: What are your next career plans? What would you like to do this year?

PD: Due to the coronavirus outbreak, my primary plans were changed. I was scheduled to do some presentations of the Connexion project at kingt gut! conference in Hamburg and AES in Vienna. My Polyphony project was about to premiere on festivals but all of that needed to be changed in the face of this new situation. I hope that I will be able to have this works presented in the second half of this year and in the meantime I’m working with my team on new projects and continuations of previous projects.

I’m working on and the second edition of my Connexion project, (codename: Re:Connexion). It’s a virtual sound art installation that exists in XR. It is an interactive music/sound interface, on which you will be able to perform. This is going to be a multiplayer application, so the performance will be collaborative. This installation will be placed in venues such as physical museums (in a designated room for it) and in the internet as well, so you will be able to perform with your friend that is standing right next to you and people from all around the world at the same time.