Building Navigable Listening Experiences Based on Spatial Soundfield Capture: the case of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 6

We present our work towards the recording and reproduction of a captured soundfield as a virtual walking experience. In this context, we propose a methodology for recording symphonic concerts that captures both stage and concert hall listening perspectives. The recreation of the experience allows for a virtual walker to explore a plurality of listening perspectives in the venue, and is attended by new challenges in performance capture, mastering and, rendering–all of which stem from the need to maintain a musically balanced listening experience that can adapt to a constantly changing listener position. We present our approach through the creation of an immersive music experience which is deployed for evaluation on two different kinds of audio displays: one with binaural rendering to headphones, and the other that renders to a hybrid loudspeaker system comprising our Satosphere (a large dome with a total of 157 speakers aggregated into 31 channels) for far field audio, and our set of five 12-channel spherical speakers (called Audiodice) for near field audio. The collected data is composed of 64+ audio channel recordings of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montr´eal conducted by Kent Nagano and a 3D model of the Maison Symphonique de Montréal. This data is described in detail below, and made available with a non-commercial Creative Commons licenc