Interview Recap with Jacqueline Bosnjak and Dylan Marcus of Mach1
Spatial Audio’s 3D audio technology is transforming the way that sound designers create surround sound, allowing for immersive soundscapes and a theater-like experience. The Mach1 suite is at the forefront of the spatial audio world and is helping to democratize this exciting new frontier of audio so that creators of all backgrounds can use it as a medium. We sat down with Jacqueline Bosnjak, CEO/founder of Mach1, and Dylan Marcus, the company’s technical director to talk about how they created these tools, their experiences in the world of spatial audio, and how they see spatial audio reshaping the listening landscape over the coming years.
Can you share with us a quick personal background? Where did you study, did you have early passions in this field, what were some early inspirations or interests that you think may have led you here?
We were like-minded individuals working on some projects. And we happened to get several projects that had to do with XR and interactivity of many kinds, early VR projects and some 360 projects. It became clear that the solutions available for mixing diverted away from traditional post production. We're trying to introduce these new paradigms and that made it challenging not only technically, but creatively, to execute high quality post-production for audio.
We were in this really unique position to be blocked by all these problems that both objects and ambisonic presented. We realized that with immersion, sound was key. It was critical that we were able to bring our full creativity into this medium but the tools that were at our disposal just weren't allowing us to do that. At the same time that that was happening, we were working on some of the most exciting projects like Alien, Mr. Robot, The Martian, and Passengers. Necessity is the mother of invention. That's really the case that happened with us. We were blocked from doing our work but we found ways around it and became a technology company that spun out of those challenges.
We were basically flying a plane while building it. That's how working in XR and spatial audio has always been. Then couple that with problems with distribution and hardware devices, and all these different technologies we needed did not exist. We were in this unique position to create a turnkey solution and sort of patent the foundational building blocks for unifying multi channel and spatial audio, and therefore unblock everything for creators and developers alike.
How did working in the Hollywood environment shape the development of Mach1?
The Hollywood companies had very high expectations for Hollywood grade, high quality audio. They weren't happy with Ambisonics, or game object sound that was coming from a game engine only. They pushed us to the limit. We thought, “Why can't we bring in all this creativity and unlock the doors for all engineers and artists to immediately work in spatial audio?” This is the golden age of bringing back high quality audio, because we knew as we were working in VR, if you had bad quality, fuzziness, or things that just didn't add up, it would immediately break immersion, and that was unacceptable to the director or the production company. We thought this was a really unique opportunity to usher in high quality sound again, and make people care about it.
We're not here to bash any single solution or alternative, we positioned ourselves on the path of making a framework that everyone can work on. So you could select what tool you need, instead of trying to introduce to the market another proprietary tool, which is what put us in the position of being blocked and needing to develop our own solution in the first place.
Mach1 offers a very reasonable price point compared to other spatial audio formatting options which offer free or very pricey packages. Mach1 offers a pass for $100 or $500. How were you able to offer this, or what was the drive behind that option? Are you passionate about democratizing this capability for users?
We feel our mission is to be the defenders of the audio realm. We really do not need to raise money and have to be beholden to investors telling us how to release stuff. We're trying to figure out the best way to make these tools more accessible.
There aren't a lot of people who even understand they could make spatial audio, so we're doing everything we can to make these tools more accessible. We're trying to make mixing and transcoding and spatial audio as accessible as possible and get it in the hands of everyone so we could see how the medium can flourish.
What first got you involved with the Metaverse? What was your vision, or what is your vision within that world?
We make a framework that works on all platforms that’s super lightweight and lets you approach multi channel audio however you want. You can even make your own multichannel configuration or your own version of surround format or Dolby Atmos or an object format, or ATM, or whatever. The point of it is to be flexible and easy to approach. We're trying to listen to the community to make sure we identify how to make it easier and easier to approach for both developers and creators. The point of it is that it really works anywhere. We don't really care where it's used. It's a framework that should be used everywhere equally, without bias.
With the metaverse interoperability and futureproofing, being able to jump and take assets between different roles becomes really important. Our framework actually really shines when you look at it in that sort of ecosystem.
With the VR Worlds and spatial audio, what were some of the roadblocks early on, and how did you go about overcoming them?
We're trying to really open up our research to everyone so that everything that we've learned and gone through can be helpful to someone else, because, this is really only a medium if there are many creators, not just us. How do we get over the pain points? In a word, painfully.
In the studio, we used waterfall style production. But then with XR, VR, AR, it became much more like developing software where it's iterative. We got commissioned to work on Unchained, which was one of the first VR theatrical pieces where they were both live actors in an animated engine. So we had to research and develop how this could play out and then build everything from scratch. Out of that comes something that gets added to our SDK, which is really exciting. We really look for projects that are going to push us to do new things, we don't really want to keep doing the same thing. So whenever somebody has a project where they're saying “I don't know if I can do this.” We're like, “This is going to be an exciting one to work on.”
Where do you hope to see the world of spatial audio production head? With World Building in virtual reality, it’s so exciting thinking about bringing to life these creative landscapes or dreamscapes of artists and creators. What do you hope to see come through the pipeline in that way?
I just think it's the rewiring of your ears when you're wearing headphones. Our ears are blocked from hearing naturally and we almost need to relearn how to hear because we haven't been using our ears in those environments.
People often say, do you think spatial audio is gonna be a thing? Although that question comes up a lot less often now that Apple is into the market. But of course it's going to be a thing. I mean, we hear that way naturally, I think people forget that. It's not something that's just bells and whistles, and this feature that's gonna blow you away. It's just literally enabling you to hear, as you would naturally.
We've been very lucky to have artists who wanted to explore spatial audio more agnostically. We've heard so many interesting spatial music mixes and some spatial podcast concept mixes that were creatively very interesting. We’re excited about artists who are going to be mixing in spatial first. We're gonna see a world where there will be spatial audio music mixes, and that will be very different from other tracks in stereo.
But today, there's a lot of blockers in distributing something like that without it massively morphing or down mixing into something that can be shipped via Apple spatial or Dolby, Atmos, or so on and so forth. A lot of artists who have done these experiments are holding it for the future when there is more agnostic support for spatial audio. But we've had this little look into the immediate future, in terms of what can exist.
If I'm listening to a spatial music mix that was intended to be spatial, and I'm maybe walking to get my coffee, and then I go to another coffee spot the next time, it will be a different experience for me. There’s something very interesting about making a spatial mix that is so direct with the end user and listener. We're just excited to see that being a distributed medium, so other people can also understand that type of spatial audio.
Can you talk about what speakers or headphones do you guys really enjoy to be able to start listening to spatial audio personally?
It's early days, so there's only a few headphones that have spatial audio with interactivity, meaning head tracking or positional. We actually have a post that's trying to track that to help people. Right now, we're kind of in a world where people just need to use what is available. But we do know that in the coming years, that market is going to expand in a major way.
A few years ago, we printed our own IMU that could Velcro on any headphone and playback mark on spatial any of the formats that mark on spatial transcodes to. We just expected the marketplace to move much quicker than it has. And so initially, we had approached a few companies and said, “Hey, do you want to make this IMU that just velcros onto any headphone?” because we thought that that would be the coolest product. If anybody's listening and wants to deploy the cool IMU, hit us up.
We are hoping to transform the possibilities of spatial audio and are hoping to support the community of artists and expand the audience.