Dealing with thousands of dialogue lines has inspired ingenuity, creativity, tantrums and nervous breakdowns. The software used is myriad and methods swing from lunacy to genius. Get down and dirty therapy; share stories and find Holy Grails.

Almost every studio and every audio engineer still have different approaches and ‘standards’ when it comes to recording and mastering dialogue.  Can we thrash out and write a best practice Bible on one side of paper?

If 3D printing is the next big thing in technology, what opportunities does it afford when it comes to audio?

When it’s time to build the dream product, or series of products, yer gonna want yer best possible noises.

So you bring in the Dream Team, naturally, but how best to set them up?  What tricks have Time and Experience taught us about the environment, the structure, the attitude–and how can we anticipate changes to those lessons over the next few years?

How do these things change in the future, with vastly improved collaboration tools, teleconferencing, telepresence, lifecasting, and with new tools blurring lines between “integration,” “music” and “sound design:”  Who punches the clock at the factory, who commutes to his garage studio in bunny slippers?   How big are the teams?  How do we account for slippery job titles?  How frequent are physical/virtual meetings?  What’s flow of control and command will work best?  What about interactions Audio has with the deeper technical teams and loftier Vision-Holders?  Collaborations with outside contributors?  What about it?  HUH?  WHAT ABOUT IT?!?!?!?

We often talk about ‘immersive audio’, where one feels like they are in the middle of a game, orchestra or movie. The use of spatial audio (HRTFs, room models, BRIRs, etc.) to render these immersive scenes is usually the ‘go-to’ idea. Some of the problems with synthetic spatial audio, as well as binaural field recordings, are:

1) The visual cues are missing or wrong.
2) Head motion is not taken into account.
3) HRTFs are generic and not individualized.
4) The listener’s environment is not taken into account.

That last point is particularly important. If you have a binaural recording made in a small room, but you listen to it in a large room, it will sound terribly colored. In fact, if the room you are listening in is not taken into account, any synthetic or binaural recording will have coloration.

Another big issue is that, if the visual cue is missing, the listener tends to localize the sound behind them (or at least somewhere outside of their field of vision).

So what can be done to mitigate these issues? Is this something that we can engineer (i.e., build me some new, celebrity endorsed headphones), or is it a matter of getting the signal processing just right (can you say ‘head tracker’, hallelujah!), or are there limitations at the cognitive level that need to be addressed?

According to a 2013 survey by Motorola, more people watch TV and movies on tablets than on television sets/home theatres. More people than ever consume most of their sound over headphones, rather than speakers.

• How do we adjust our creative practices for headphone listening?
• What improvements to headphone sound do we need?
• How can we prevent people from damaging their ears when so much sound is consumed loudly on headphones?
• What other questions do we need to explore and address related to  headphone listening?

There are elements that could tie in with the binaural tracking workgroup proposal.

More and more gesture-based computer controllers are being developed (Leap motion, Myo, etc.). In the movies and TV (hello, Star Trek fans), these always have sounds, but as yet, these devices are usually released without sounds, to have each implementation/software using the device implement their own fx.

Should gestural sounds have some form of standardization, in the way that keyboard sounds and mouse clicks have?  What are some “universal” gestures that might need a standard set of interface sounds?

The New York Times reported that Google Fiber “is so fast, it’s hard to know what to do with it.” After downloading 612 kitten photos in one second, researchers wondered what to do next with the gigabit connection.

Could the killer app involve audio? As gigabit speeds roll out across America, what are the audio opportunities?

If you were to build a recording studio for games dialogue recording what would it be like? Regular recording studios and existing recording software are the round hole that the square peg, nay, the multi-dimensional spaghetti peg, of games gets hammered through. What needs to change to make the games specialist studio technically on the nail and creatively inspiring?

Anyone up for brainstorming for the ultimate studio design and recording software design wish list? Is the market for games production big enough for the likes of Avid, Steinberg, Adobe, Sony etc to take commercial interest in game specific tools/features?

Topics of discussion: The effective use of Head tracking position methods in Binaural and Augmented Reality applications. How much impact on the Center image stability is gained by the use of a Head-tracking device. Can a realistic 2D & 3D experience happen without the use of Headtracking  methods. Will Augmented Reality devices make Head tracking mandatory? What is the minimum degree of accuracy attainable and also required?