The sound of a club, concert, or audiovisual show is one of the most critical aspects of the overall experience. The vibrations through your body, the soundscapes taking over your psyche. Experiencing sound is truly multi-sensory. However, there might even be another dimension to sound in the current days. We spoke to multidisciplinary artist Max Cooper about his immersive audio approach ahead of his listening session at the Dolby Atmos x Mercedes-Benz Hangout during this year’s Amsterdam Dance Event at Q-Factory.
Known for his multidisciplinary approach that merges electronic music, visual art, and scientific inquiry, Max Cooper is truly an audio-visual artist with a science PhD. After a brief post-doctoral career as a geneticist, Cooper opts to devote himself entirely to music. His work, which often explores complex themes such as humanity's place in the world, is noted for its emotional resonance and sensory immersion.
As a pioneer in multidimensional sound, he continually brings his scientific exploration into the art he creates through a combination of installations, live performances, and immersive audio-visual experiences. You might recognize him from his 2019 A/V show at the Barbican in London, or perhaps you've seen his installation in collaboration with Architecture Social Club at Draaimolen Festival in 2022.
However, before getting into the world of sound Cooper is creating, let’s dive into a brief summary of the evolution of sound. Sound is cast through channels. While ‘mono’ sound only uses one channel, stereo is coming from two channels. The modern form of stereo sound has been around since the 1930s, founded by British engineer Alan Blumlein.
Now think back to the last time you were at the cinema. At the peak of the movie, a rumbling helicopter flies over the ocean amidst a big thunderstorm. The rotating blades seem to move through space, the rain, water, and thunder clash on both sides of you. This is surround sound, and it has been around for decades. It’s basically the use of multiple speakers around a listener - typically six, but could be more.
Today, the next step within the evolution of sound is rising: ‘spatial’ or ‘3D’ audio. Opposing the ‘mono’ or ‘stereo’ sound, spatial audio is not limited to channels but is ‘object-based’. It’s an ongoing cycle of research and development and we are in the middle of it. Within this realm of spatial audio, there is ‘binaural’ audio. By imitating human hearing and reproducing our natural way of experiencing sound, binaural audio makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of the sound, fully immersed, while just wearing headphones. The sound image changes based on your viewing and listening direction. This all happens in the digital domain and there are different methods to achieve this.
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'It needs to convey something of the human message'
Max Cooper, however, given his scientific background, is one of those artists where it feels like the evolution of technology can barely keep up with his unbridled pioneering spirit. He implements Dolby Atmos 3D audio techniques in a variety of formats beyond headphones only. When we ask him about the influences of his scientific origins he recalls: ‘I can’t see my parallel self who didn’t go intoresearch so it’s hard to say, but at least on a basic level both my research and my music involve me sitting in front of a computer playing with abstract pattern generation systems. I think there’s a love of aesthetics and problem solving that transfers across, and perhaps influences the type of approach to music. I love tiny-scale musical detailing as much as the regular large-scale structures, things that you don’t hear unless you really focus with good headphones or a spatial audio format. That seems somewhat linked to a reductionist form of scientific thinking, perhaps.’
So what is it that sets Max apart from others experimenting with spatial sound techniques? He is embracing this technology to bring a 3D sound experience to the physical space on an immersive scale. You can imagine having speakers in a 360 degrees circling around you - from top to bottom, from left to right. Cooper explains how this set-up creates new creative possibilities: “Those are ‘object-based’ systems, so my process involves building each piece of music as a sort of living three-dimensional entity with lots of moving and interacting parts. ‘Object based’ means I can build a 3D model that will play back on whatever system happens to be in a space, and I don’t need to re-design the whole show for each different room. As opposed to non-object based systems where I would be deciding which speaker to send which sounds to.”
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Being an artist with as much focus on the visual as on the sonic, Cooper tells how sound becomes an actual living sculpture able to transmit a deeper artistic message: “The 3D audio sculpture entity I build needs to match up with the aesthetics of the visual that is usually also working with, and also convey the meaning of the piece of music. Which is the whole point of spatial audio, it needs to convey something of the human message which the music and visual is about, otherwise, it’s just surface bling.”
You could state both artists and listeners are looking to find a point of common ground when listening to a shared audio piece. It’s like a language that surpasses words. Music evokes emotions or has the ability to let loose all emotions. Cooper explains that such an object-based set-up can help to add another dimension to this language. “One simple example from my last album mixed in Dolby Atmos at String n Tins Studio was the title track Unspoken Words with engineers Will Cohen and Niels Orens - the idea was about what can be communicated beyond and without spoken language. So we left a big hole in the spatial form, a gap where usually the music would be front on, as a way of making the listener experience indirect communication, the spatial design telling the story of the record.”
Being an artist with as much focus on the visual as on the sonic, Cooper tells how sound becomes an actual living sculpture able to transmit a deeper artistic message: “The 3D audio sculpture entity I build needs to match up with the aesthetics of the visual that is usually also working with, and also convey the meaning of the piece of music. Which is the whole point of spatial audio, it needs to convey something of the human message which the music and visual is about, otherwise, it’s just surface bling.”
You could state both artists and listeners are looking to find a point of common ground when listening to a shared audio piece. It’s like a language that surpasses words. Music evokes emotions or has the ability to let loose all emotions. Cooper explains that such an object-based set-up can help to add another dimension to this language. “One simple example from my last album mixed in Dolby Atmos at String n Tins Studio was the title track Unspoken Words with engineers Will Cohen and Niels Orens - the idea was about what can be communicated beyond and without spoken language. So we left a big hole in the spatial form, a gap where usually the music would be front on, as a way of making the listener experience indirect communication, the spatial design telling the story of the record.”
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So, challenge accepted, said Cooper and his team of aural adventurers when being invited for the listening session at the Dolby Atmos x Mercedes-Benz Hangout at Q-Factory. During Sounds Out of Bounds on October 20th at Amsterdam Dance Event, Cooper will present an intimate insight into his unique creative process, illustrating how and why he deploys these techniques to add an immersive narrative to his work at the intersection of music, science, and art.
