Lesson 2: Placing an Object in a Scene
Like a traditional DAW, Spatial provides tools that will allow you to position audio elements in a soundfield, but instead of using conventional pan controls to place sounds into a predefined set of channel outputs, such as left, center or right, you’ll instead designate sounds as Objects within a Scene. A Scene is a collection of sound Objects that contain an understanding of where those Objects are in relation to each other. A Scene’s Objects can then be overlaid on top of a Spacemap. A Spacemap provides detailed information about where speakers are located in an expected playback environment, which is referred to as a deployment. There are two systems within the Spatial ecosystem involved in this process of authoring and rendering a Scene in a Space. Spatial Studio is your design tool that lets you create the Scene, and Spatial Reality is the underlying audio engine that performs the magic of rendering the Scene using whatever speakers are available in any Space.
It is to be expected that not every creator will have a working physical Space. Since Local Mode with Spatial Headspace enables users to work on their computer with just a pair of speakers or headphones, these lessons are designed for use in Local Mode using the predefined local-only Spaces,. You can then connect to any deployment when one is available, and the Scenes you create in these tutorials will play in any Space.
Importing a Sound as an Object
Over the next few lessons you’ll work to build an aviary soundscape. You can imagine that this audible space will include various birds, but it could also include the sound of insects, fountains, or even a small stream. For this first lesson you’ll focus on introducing a single bird sound as an Object within a Spatial Scene. This will give you an opportunity to get familiar with the Spatial Studio user interface and learn important concepts about how Spatial works.
NOTE: If you have not downloaded the associated asset files, please visit the Resources page in Lesson 1.