photo: Weitnauer/IRT

• Andreas Silzle from Fraunhofer IIS went up north for not just enjyoing some bright days in Norwegian Midsummer but to present ORPHEUS results at the Nordic Sound Sympoium in the vicinity of Oslo. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Nordic Sound Symposium has long since become the major event for audio professionals in the north European Countries.
• Right after our final workshop in May we have written-up our achievements for the vdt-magazine (Verband Deutscher Tonmeister). This article in English provides in a very condensed form a complete overview on the results. It is also available here from our website.
• Another article, this time in German, has been published in September in the magazine of the Rundfunkmuseum Fürth (Radio Museum, by the way, it is located in the Grundig Mansion, right at the heart where the factory once was, and houses a brillant collection of historic radio and TV devices). You may read this article here.
• The EBU was so kind to host once again our ORPHEUS app this year on their booth at IBC in Amsterdam.
• Two years ago our technical leader Andreas Silzle outlined the intentions of the ORPHEUS project, this year, Werner Bleisteiner got invited to present the outcome at the Workshop Digital Broadcast in Erfurt , organised by Fraunhofer IDMT Ilmenau. The discussions and exchange at this biennally high level exeperts meeting proved to be very fruitful, as one of the major topics there was the emerging 5G mobile communications technology and its applicability for broadcast services. Here, object-based media is to expect exciting new opportunities.
  

  photos: wb (unless otherwise stated)

• EBU New Radio Day in Dublin in October offered another international opportunity to tell about the new creative perspectives that object-based audio is about to bring to the media industry and how ORPHEUS pioneered this development.  Here, more than 100 broadcast managers and exceutives from all EBU 27 member countries were assembled to exchange on  best-practice and discuss latest trends of radio content.
•  No doubt, the biennal Tonmeistertagung in Cologne, in Mid-November, is a must-shop-up for anything in audio. In 2016, with joint forces, we had organised a complete afternoon session (to recap, read this post). Although we no longer existed officially, we were present at the booth of the IRT with our app and in the poster sessions with the results from our Quality of Experience evaluations. Michael Meier and Benjamin Weiss from IRT explained details of recent ADM and object-based production developments in talks. ‘Object-based audio’ was a hot topic in demos from IRT, Fraunhofer IIS and Magix. As we now see, the whole industry is about to move into this paradigm shift.

• As the quintessence achivemenets of ORPHEUS are taken as basis for new standards (take a look at this overview), the EBU is in many ways an essential partner and hub for all those connected activites. The Next Generation Audio Workshop at EBU’s headquarter in Geneva brought together all driving partners, broadcasters and media industry, to present their latest developments and exchange on common interest and strategic moves. Werner Bleisteiner from BR was to present the approaches and results from ORPHEUS’ Quality of User Experience evaluations. ADM experts David Marston from BBC R&D and Bejamin Weiss from IRT outlines the roadmaps and details of the format. But the main signal to be taken from this meeting was to notice that the ADM standard (ITU BS.2076-1) is now generally accepted and adapted as the professional production standard in broadcasting. All partners in the market for Next Generation Audio distribution codecs are working on implementations into their systems.
• As it is essential to expose innovations early to the next generation still enrolled at universities, Andreas Silzle went to present ORPHEUS at the Acoustic Seminar at the Deggendorf Institute of Technology. There, again, an audience of about 100 graduates and experts were eager to learn about the future audio technology.
• On December 5th, the sound engineers from VDT regional group Munich went to visit the IRT and get informed about the latest developments in audio technology. The basics in future production with ADM, as well as the ORPHEUS app for end user delivery formed the frame.

Presenting ORPHEUS results at the Munich workshop: Dr. Andreas Silzle, coordinator of ORPHEUS (photo: Johann Dafelmaier/IRT).

The ORPHEUS project has created a full set of tools and applications for all stages of the complete broadcast workflow. Our goals were:

• To provide the end-users with a future-proof radio service which exceeds their expectations.
• To support the industry to master the technical challenges in object-based audio and IP-based delivery.
• To help the (public) broadcasters to lead this transition phase and to survive in the global internet world.

The consortium ran two successful pilots to demonstrate the key features and benefits of object-based broadcasting:

• Foreground/ background control
• Language selection
• Immersive sound
• Enhanced programme services

Pilot 1 was the first ever live object-based interactive radio drama, and was produced using the BBC’s IP Studio platform in the ORPHEUS studio in BBC Broadcasting House. Pilot 2 premiered the introduction of variable-length functionality for audio. With this the listener decides about the length he likes to listen to a podcast or program and the broadcaster decides on a meaningful shortening by setting priority level markers for program sections. These pilots have proven the advantages of object-based media as a universal, innovative approach for media production and its applicability in real-world broadcast environments.

ORPHEUS project coordinator Andreas Silzle from Fraunhofer IIS said: “It is not possible to fulfill such a huge task with one research institute, one company or one broadcaster. Here, a powerful team is necessary with experts along the complete broadcast chain. We have had a team of four research institutes, three industry companies, two public broadcasters and one consulting company, fulfilling all the necessary expertise and long year experience requirements. Thanks to all these professional inputs, we could achieve our great results.”

All our results are published in quite a number of Conference and Journal Papers. For more details see also our Public Deliverables and the new or updated International Standards we have contributed to.
To sum up:

• OBA is an advanced approach for creating and deploying interactive, personalised, scalable and immersive content.
• OBA is responsive to the user needs as well as to environmental and platform-specific factors.
• OBA reduces the necessary transport capacity to the end-user.
• OBA is an essential component for Radio/TV/Online cross-media demands.
• No one who has used the benefits on the production or reproduction side would like to step back to the old ‘static’ production.

In conclusion, Andreas Silzle said: “OBA is a major step forward for audio broadcasting, and ORPHEUS is proud of having pioneered this important development.”

At the HIGH END audio trade show in Munich, Germany (May 10^th – 13^th, 2018), visitors were able to experience the first Trinnov Audio device that supports the interactive and immersive audio format MPEG-H 3D Audio, introducing the advantages of object-based audio with productions from the OPRHEUS pilots to the audiophile community.

In addition, Benjamin Duval from Trinnov and Werner Bleisteiner from BR in Munich were presenting the outline of the ORPHEUS project daily in the High End Kolleg to the visitors. This, too, was followed with great interest.

Turning down the volume of the commentary in a sports broadcast in order to achieve a true stadium atmosphere; being able to better understand the dialogue in an action movie by softening background noise effects; enjoying a TV movie with 3D sound, as if one were watching it in a theatre. These are just three of the advantages of MPEG-H 3D Audio, a format substantially developed by Fraunhofer IIS. At the HIGH END trade show in Munich, Trinnov Audio, the French manufacturer of high-quality audio processors and controllers for HiFi, home cinema and professional applications, premiered an MPEG-H enabled Altitude 32 home cinema preamplifier. The award-winning device will be equipped with MPEG-H support as a standard feature by a software update.

Munich, 11th May 2018. Imagine you could adapt the length of a radio documentary as you require or listen to a radio drama from the positions of different protagonists in the play. These and many more personalised, immersive listener experiences become possible due to a novel technological concept called object-based media, which will fundamentally change the production and user experience of radio broadcasts and multimedia productions. Key tools and apps for implementing object-based media for audio content have been developed by ORPHEUS, an EU-funded research project performed by ten major European media industry players.

On 15th May 2018, the consortium will present their results at a workshop in Munich to about 150 representatives of the global media industry. The event will be hosted by IRT, the research institute of the public broadcasters of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Object-based media

Object-based media is an advanced approach for creating and deploying interactive, personalised, scalable and immersive content. It allows media objects to be assembled in novel ways to create new and enhanced user experiences, being responsive to user needs as well as environmental and platform-specific factors. Examples are the adaptation of the dialogue level, the flexible playback on any end device or the variable length of a program. This technology is also an essential component for Radio/TV/Online cross-media demands. Moreover, it enables the transition from linear to non-linear and both on-air and on-demand listening, using broadcast and IP technologies.

Broadcasting architectures and infrastructures have been developed, refined and optimised over the last 100 years. Up to now, the final product delivered to the audience, was assembled edited, mixed and configured as an unchangeable entity, leaving little or no options for adjustments according to the reception conditions and the personal preferences of the recipient. The object-based media approach fundamentally changes this principle: A production is now a collection of media assets, so called ‘objects’, along with parameters or ‘metadata’, describing their attributes and relationship. This package is delivered to an end user device, where it gets optimally ‘rendered’ according to the capability of the device, environmental conditions and user preferences.

ORPHEUS results

The ORPHEUS project has created a full set of tools and applications for all stages of the complete broadcast workflow. The consortium ran two successful pilots to demonstrate the key features and benefits of object-based broadcasting, including immersive sound, foreground/background control, language selection, and enhanced programme services. In addition, Pilot 1 was the first ever live object-based interactive radio drama, and was produced using the BBC’s IP Studio platform. Pilot 2 premiered the introduction of variable-length functionality for audio. These pilots have proven the advantages of object-based media as a universal, innovative approach for media production and its applicability in real-world broadcast environments.

The key achievements of ORPHEUS include:

• Object-based audio capturing and production tools by BBC, b<>com, IRCAM, MAGIX
• Pre-processing, rendering and encoding applications by IRT and Fraunhofer IIS (MPEG-H)
• Reception devices and apps by Trinnov (Altitude 32) and elephantcandy (iOS app)
• Technical guidelines for implementation and source code of an OBA production renderer published by the EBU (Tech 3388 and TR042)

The project results are fully documented in public deliverables, available on the project website.

ORPHEUS App

An evaluation version of the ORPHEUS app for iOS, which demonstrates the project achievements using the pilot productions made by BBC and BR, is available upon registration from the projects website. These productions show the advantages of object-based audio in a broad range of radio formats, including live football report, documentary, radio drama and music.

Further details on the ORPHEUS workshop at IRT in Munich on 15th May 2018, 10:00-17:00, are available on the workshop page.

About ORPHEUS

ORPHEUS is a European research project under Horizon 2020 dedicated to improving the management of audio content. It has developed, implemented and validated a new end-to-end object-based media chain for audio content. The consortium consists of 10 partners from 4 countries: Fraunhofer IIS (DE – coordinator), Eurescom (DE), BBC (UK), IRT (DE), Elephantcandy (NL), Trinnov (FR), b<>com (FR), IRCAM (FR), BR (DE), Magix (DE).

Project coordinator: Andreas Silzle, Fraunhofer IIS
Press contact: Milon Gupta, Eurescom, phone: +49 6221 989 121
E-mail: info(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)orpheus-audio.eu

Acknowledgement
The ORPHEUS project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 687645.

Disclaimer
The content of this press release is owned by the ORPHEUS project consortium. The European Commission has no responsibility for the content. This press release may contain forward-looking statements relating to advanced information and communication technologies. The ORPHEUS project consortium does not accept any responsibility or liability for any use made of the information provided in this press release.

ORPHEUS at the BBC’s Sounds Amazing conference (photo: BBC).

Following the success of “Sound: Now and Next” in 2015, the BBC brought hundreds of audio producers and technologists back to Broadcasting House in London for a full day conference called “Sounds Amazing” on 2nd May 2018. The event included talks from the producers of inspiring works such as Blue Planet 2, and featured a technology fair sponsored by the S3A project that showcased the latest audio technology. The talks included a session on immersive audio, which memorably demonstrated the power of binaural audio using hundreds of wireless headphones with an on-stage dummy head microphone (see picture).

The talks also featured a number of object-based audio experiences, such as an interactive voice-controlled drama, and a demonstration of media device orchestration. ORPHEUS exhibited in the technology fair, where we presented The Mermaid’s Tears interactive radio drama, and our iPhone app that showcases a variety of object-based experiences. The event received such positive feedback that it will now be run as a regular bi-annual event.

Further information on the BBC website

The ORPHEUS Radio app (photo: elephantcandy).

The primary objective of ORPHEUS is to create a full object-based workflow, from the initial recording of the program to its reception by the listener. The ORPHEUS Radio iOS app was developed by elephantcandy to bring the benefits and innovations of object-based broadcasting to a larger audience and investigate the use of this new technology in many different situations and scenarios. Two studies were carried out to validate the usability and usefulness of the app in various configurations.

Technically, the app is the first mobile application to use the MPEG-H next-generation audio codec, which supports audio objects, flexible rendering and streaming over MPEG-DASH. Among the many object-based audio features in the app are immersive audio formats including binaural and up to 7.1 Surround via HDMI, foreground / background balance to increase the intelligibility of speech, interactive 3D object positioning, selection from multiple languages and variable-length playback.

The radio programs available in the app were mostly produced during the project and highlight various object-based features. The content includes radio documentaries, music and an interactive version of a live football match from BR, as well as radio dramas from the BBC.
The ORPHEUS Radio app is still in pre-release stage. If you are interested in trying it out, please visit our iOS App page to receive a redeem code for the AppStore.

ORPHEUS partner b<>com at NAB Show, 7 – 12 April 2018 (photo: b<>com).

With around 100,000 attendees every year, NAB Show in Las Vegas is the world’s largest show focusing on media technology. Already present in 2016 and 2017, b<>com had again a stand in the 2018 NAB Show Futures Park area where they showcased some of the production tools developed during the course of the ORPHEUS project.

The demonstration presented by Nicolas Epain, audio research engineer at b<>com, took the visitors through the process of creating spatialised soundtracks for immersive media experiences, from production to distribution and playback. The first step of the demonstration focused on recording 3D audio scenes using a Zylia ZM-1 spherical microphone array. The microphone signals were converted into Higher-Order Ambisonic signals (HOA) and monitored using VST plugins developed by b<>com during the ORPHEUS project.

The second step of the demo highlighted post-production and mixing for 360-degree movies using CinematicVR, a tool developed by the French startup Aspic Technologies. This tool allows to create immersive soundtracks consisting of audio objects, HOA and channel-based audio. The obtained soundtrack can then be exported in the Audio Definition Model (ADM) format.

In the final step of the demo, visitors could experience two different immersive audiovisual experiences: “Alteration” by Jérôme Blanquet, and “Longing for Wilderness” by Marc Zimmermann. The soundtracks of both movies consisted of HOA compressed using the MPEG-H 3D audio codec.

And all of a sudden it’s just 8 weeks before the end…. We’ve deliberately planned our last working meeting to be held at IRT in Munich, as this will also be the venue for our final workshop on May 15th.

And so the final planning of this event was one of the main tasks during the two days meeting. We’re really excited and encouraged, as until now already more than 100 participants have registered  (so if you haven’t done so yet, you better hurry up and go here).

By now, most of the operational tasks of our project have been concluded. Only ‘pilot phase 2 – Enhanced object-based audio for online demand’ is still running. Here, we’ve focussed on developing the “variable length feature” for some of our demo productions. This has also been successfully implemented in a beta version of our app just a few days ago. We will be able to deliver a major update of the ORPHEUS App after some more internal testings and evaluations.

As our public user exerience tests at JOSEPHS had been finished by the end of February, we also had a first look at the results from the test conducted there. This, too, was very encouraging (details on that will be published soon in our ‘D5.6 Report on Audio subjective and User tests’).

Although the ORPHEUS project will come officially to an end, all partners strive for further collaboration. First steps in that directions have just been taken with the support from the EBU:

• a specification and initial version of an open source ADM Renderer has been published as  EBU Tech 3388
• a dedicated paper with the specification of our OBA broadcasting architecture will be published soon as EBU TR 042
• a white paper from Fraunhofer IIS is under way, describing an operable profile for ADM to MPEG-H conversion
• we’re also investigating possibilities to set-up an ‘object-based audio development platform’ in collaboration with the EBU to encourage other broadcasters and content creators to explore the new possibilities

So we’re heading towards the end, knowing that there are always new finishing lines beyond.

The ORPHEUS team has developed and published an app that allows anyone interested to experience the project’s vision for object-based audio. The ORPHEUS App runs on mobile devices with the iOS operating system (version 10.X or higher, running on iPhone 6 upwards). The app is available for free via the ORPHEUS website.

Further information and registration are available on the ORPHEUS iOS App Page.