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Presented at the Conference on
Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality
2016 September 30–October 1, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Audio Engineering Society.

Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways

1 2
Ola Björling , Eric Thorsell
1
Global Director of VR, MediaMonks
2
Senior Sound Designer, MediaMonks

Correspondence should be addressed to Ola Björling (ola@mediamonks.com)

ABSTRACT
MediaMonks were approached by Etihad Airways via their ad agency The Barbarian Group to create a Virtual
Reality experience taking place aboard their Airbus A380, the worlds largest and most luxurious non-private
airplane. Challenges included capturing audio including dialogue aboard the real plane, crafting an experience
that encourages repeated viewing and combining a sense of truthful realism with a sense of dream-like luxury
without relying on a musical score, all in a head tracked spatialized mix. Artistic conventions around non-
diegetic sound and their psychological impact in VR also required consideration.
Björling, Thorsell
1. Introduction
With the objective of creating an immersive
experience of a virtual flight with the amazing
Etihad A380 while conveying a narrative structure
and encouraging a second and third view, audio
played a key role in this production. The task was
also to do all this in the form of cinematic VR with
the appearance of a major Hollywood feature film.
We were striving for a realistic and authentic sound
while realizing that pure realism isn’t always in the
user’s best interest. Creating a distinct feeling of
smooth, effortless luxury was very important from
the start and to achieve that we would need some
audio enhanced storytelling. There was to be music
only for the titles and credits so the audio in itself
would have to carry enough emotional power to
create this feeling.
Figure 1. Grounded Etihad A380 plane.
2. Choice of audio engine
We tested several different methods for creating and
playing back spatial audio before deciding on the
toolset for this project. The production scope
involved MediaMonks producing a proprietary app
which allowed for some freedom in choosing a
suitable audio engine, but at the same time there had
to be a mix that could live in channels like Youtube
and Facebook 360. Choice of playback sound engine
naturally has an impact on mixing and potentially
even recording, so it was crucial that this research
was carried out in full before production began.
We looked at three major functional principles for
the audio engine:
• Object based systems in the form of game
engines offered excellent control over spatial
audio but proved somewhat difficult to use for
linear sound design. It would have involved
building and animating objects for every sound
source in the scene and with rapidly changing
picture edits this would have become too time
consuming for this project. Intuitive timeline
AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,
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Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways
scrolling and linear automation editing to picture
were also very important to us as we were
approaching this project from a cinematic feature
film perspective.
• Multi channel techniques like quad binaural did
offer a very detailed control over the entire
soundscape in each of the four directions, allowing
us for instance to slightly attenuate certain sounds
outside the field of view, thus letting the viewer
concentrate on the action or dialogue in the chosen
viewing direction. We had previously done several
projects this way, but the inferior spatial precision
and the lack of elevation tracking were major
drawbacks for this method.
• Motion tracked ambisonics in general looked
very promising and offered many of the things we
wanted. Plugins for DAW’s were available from
several developers with a great deal of control
over spatial positioning. However it proved
difficult to include non-diegetic material such as
music in this format since it would follow head
tracking. For us this was a really important aspect
as a score that follows movement will almost
certainly leave the viewer wondering where in the
scene the music is located, or at least break the
illusion that we’re actually on a plane.
Ultimately the verdict was that 3Dception spatial
workstation (since acquired by Facebook) from Two
Big Ears best suited our needs. It is a proprietary
format providing an end to end solution featuring
many benefits from the Ambisonics realm while also
including a static stereo stream for non-diegetic
material. The AAX format of their plugin suite
offers a set of HRTF panners in mono and
multichannel format plus ambisonic B-format
decoders. This meant we could stay with Pro Tools
for sound design thereby utilizing many of the tools
and techniques we have acquired through the years.
3Dception also allows for dynamically enhancing
the mix in the viewing direction - a “Focus” effect
which could help the viewer navigate through busy
scenes, similar to the trick allowed by quad binaural
mixes but with greater directional precision.
Björling, Thorsell
Figure 2. 3DCeption work environment.
3. Location recording
We shot most of the experience in an Etihad A380
aircraft but also had access to a training facility in
Abu Dhabi faithfully replicating the cabin
environments. We quickly realized that it would not
be enough to use an ambisonic microphone
capturing a realistic sonic representation of the scene
and that we would have to augment such a recording
with classical film style methods. Throughout this
project we kept considering how to strike the
balance between strict realism and an enhanced
cinematic experience in a way that enhances rather
than detracts from the unique form of immersion and
presence that VR can provide.
We outlined a plan to capture as many individual
close up sounds as possible along with an ambisonic
recording at camera position and to that end we used
traditional methods like booms and lapels but also
small field recording devices hidden in the props.
4. Sound design – ambiences
We recorded authentic ambiences in the various
sections of the A380 during real flights to use as a
base for the sound design and as an anchor to reality.
Using the stereo HRTF panners in 3Dception we
placed layers of these ambiences quite close to the
listener in a quad pattern which worked really well
because of the static nature of the sound in itself. We
augmented this foundation with subtle high
frequency wind noises in mono that we carefully
placed at the nearest window with the HRTF
panners. This helped to establish a fixed point in the
cabin that would rotate nicely with head movements.
We discovered that the spatialization process as
applied by this sound engine affected these sounds
slightly different at various frequencies and so we
tweaked them extensively to match spatial location
while maintaining an authentic sense of airiness and
voluminosity.
AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,
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Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways
Then we created the muffled noises from the engines
and placed them at the correct positions; The A 380
has a wingspan of around 80 meters (1) so some of
these sounds were placed 20-40 meters from the
listening position, also in mono but spread with a
slight touch of algorithmic reverb in stereo. This
worked surprisingly well to create a sense of
wideness that you experience in reality during a
flight but which proved very hard to capture in a
conventional recording.
We also tried to position faint air condition noises
elevated by the HRTF panners but it proved difficult
to sense the spatial location for these sounds so we
ended up losing them to avoid overloading the
ambience with noise.
Added to this soundscape was of course the entire
human component, the faint background walla
(crowd murmur). We paid a lot of attention in
getting the right and slightly anechoic cabin sound
due to the large amount of high frequency absorbing
provided by mainly the seats and the carpets. We
used the Coresound TetraMic to make ambisonic
recordings from the set for this, but we also used
some dry studio recordings to be able to control the
intensity of the voices at different locations. We
placed various groups of voices at different positions
to create a dynamic background that would change
with head movement as opposed to an evenly
distributed wall of walla.
Figure 4. CoreSound TetraMic.
During the pre-production process it was decided
that no musical score would be used in the cabin
scenes, as we had previously experienced how in
VR it could serve to distract the user rather than as
the emotional guide it’s intended to be in traditional
filmmaking. To make up for the emotional content
of music we worked very hard to introduce a
harmonic, almost musical sense to the ambiences.
We started out by filtering authentic cabin and
Björling, Thorsell
engine sounds with the highly resonant analog filters
in a modular synthesizer. A couple of passes with
different tunings gave us the opportunity to play
“chords” with airplane sounds. It’s important to note
that no synthesis was used—just analog filtering and
waveshaping. But as it turned out there was no way
to strike the perfect balance between sound quality
and harmony: With high resonances it started to
sound almost sinusoidal like a simple chord played
on an synthesizer and with lower resonances it
turned into an eerie windy tunnel effect.
The answer was to fill the harmonic gaps from the
peak resonant analog filters with a large number (15-
20) of digital filters that could be played
polyphonically and thus allowed us to create a wash
of tuned harmonic ambience that sounded like we
had imagined in the first place. We placed different
parts of these sounds at different spatial positions
using HRTF, thereby creating an immersive
harmonic foundation. This ambience was balanced
against the realistic sounds to create the different
signature cabin sounds that go through the entire
experience.
As observed during our recording of the plane in
flight, a lot of the ambience is spatially perceived to
originate far outside the fuselage. Extending these
ambiences to that distance away from the viewer
made the ambience much more believable, despite
being texturally quite different from the reference
recordings.
5. Dialogue and voices
No production is without surprises, and a major one
for sound was the discovery that a grounded Airbus
A380 cannot be powered up without running the
rather powerful air conditioning at high power. Due
to the noise this created, it proved to be somewhat of
a challenge capturing the close up dialogue we were
after. Since the camera solution was to not shoot
omnidirectionally, we actually had the opportunity
to occasionally use a boom and shotgun, something
that’s normally out of the question for cinematic
VR. We also used carefully placed lapels and after
reviewing the sounds we ended up using a mix of
location dialogue and ADR. We went to great efforts
to match the sound of the ADR with the location
dialogue using cabin impulse responses captured on
the plane, and we put every voice through an
individual HRTF panner to match the exact position
on screen. It also proved quite challenging to match
the sound of the last scene, shot in a studio, with
those shot in the actual cabin because of the higher
ceiling in the studio.
AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,
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Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways
The cabin emulations were applied in mono as
inserts on every channel of dialogue in order to
match the sound characteristics whilst retaining
accurate spatial positioning. With the very short
decay times involved this had almost more of an eq
effect than a room sound per se. We then used the
3Dception reflection engine to add some very subtle
early reflections in order to make all of the dialogue
sit together in the same space.
At the onset we considered the idea of recording the
dialogue with an ambisonic microphone but we
didn’t move forward with that. The main reason for
this was that the inevitable distance between the mic
and the actor would have made it impossible to get
the close up sound that we were after. It could be
argued that an ambisonic recording would have
provided greater spatial precision and more realism
over all, but we discovered that hyper realism
doesn’t always tell the story the way we wanted.
Sometimes an intimate whisper can be more
effective when not played in a realistically correct
ambience, for example.
Another task was to get the voice of the pilot over
speakers to come from the expected location
overhead. We had to do this in post since the pilot’s
lines weren’t decided at the time of the shoot. Once
his line was recorded, we played it over a small
loudspeaker placed at the correct position and
recorded its output with an ambisonic microphone.
That proved quite effective and you can easily locate
the speaker in the experience when looking up. We
actually tried to place several speakers at realistic
distances since in real life the sound wouldn’t just
come from a single speaker in the cabin, but it
tended to blur the effect a bit so we ended up using
just the one.
6. Foley and small sound effects
Since we used separated dialogue we had to recreate
all footsteps, movements and small effects to make
each scene come alive. This had the benefit of
allowing us to bring some sounds forward more than
others to achieve the effect we were looking for, and
to serve as a narrative guide for the user and to
elevate the emotional impact of the scenes. For
instance enhancing the small sounds of the leather
seats helped us to create a sense of quiet luxury. We
wanted the viewer to hear many small and normally
quiet sounds because it will create a sense that the
cabin is very quiet and that in turn would allow us to
bring up our elaborate ambience without drawing
too much attention to it. We further enhanced this
feeling by keeping the foley quite dry. Compared to
the movement sounds captured on location, these
new sounds made the entire cabin feel more
Björling, Thorsell
expensive, so to speak. These sounds were also all
mono.
In between cabins there is a text overlay explaining
in what cabin we are and where the plane is on its
journey from New York to Abu Dhabi. This is
accompanied with a classic cinema style graphic text
readout sound. We were happy to discover that the
spatial placement of this sound provided a cue for
the viewer where to look first after a scene transition
since the text was placed at the main point of action.
This is the only really synthetic sound in the
experience.
We quickly learned the importance of drawing
meticulous automation curves to make each sound
really fit the picture both in panning and in distance.
It also proved extremely important to switch
between different picture views for this. The
proprietary 3Dception video player helped get a
sense of how close things really appear in the end
experience and of course get the panning checked,
while the final output from post production, once a
scene was done, provided an important overview of
how the sounds interacted on a larger scale.
There is the possibility to use an Oculus Rift© with
the 3Dception video player but with the amount of
Pro Tools interaction required for editing this didn’t
quite fit our workflow at that point.
7. Music and transitions
The Etihad theme music, played on the planes
before take-off for example, was to be used in intro
and outro. In order not to lead the user to believe
that the music is diegetic, it was vital to be able to
keep the music in a static stereo layer, separate from
head tracking.
Starting with the stereo music master we used
techniques inherited from the 5.1 realm with
upmixers and M/S matrices subsequently fed into a
series of HRTF panners in a traditional 5.0 pattern to
give the music a really immersive quality. We
discovered how this approach worked better on
some sounds than others so we split the music into
frequency bands with individual spreading
functions.
The music was also layered, where some layers were
pushed way back through reverbs to create an
ambient mood with some sounds still being very
clearly up front. The distance controls in the HRTF
panners were really important to achieve this effect.
The picture shows the places of origin we were
imagining for the various musical components. The
AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,
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Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways
intention here was not to create a 360° sound field
but rather something similar to a cinematic
experience where there is a defined front and back.
For the transitions we used a heavily filtered
symphony orchestra wash pushed far to the sides by
the HRTF panners and put it quite low in the mix
with the intention that it should be felt rather than
heard.
Figure 5. Music layering and spatial positioning.
8. Mix
There was no mix phase in the traditional sense for
this project. Every new sound was tweaked to the
right position and level at the time it was put in and
constant adjustments were made throughout the
project. This meant that the client would always
review the actual mix, not having to imagine what
the end result would sound like thus creating an
evolving process for sound design.
We have used this approach extensively in our
previous work and while it isn’t suitable for all
projects we found it particularly useful in this case.
Positioning the sounds spatially and with the right
room reflections during sound design allowed us to
evaluate the “final” result and also to learn how the
HRTF process affected each sound. It became clear
that timing differences were important below around
800-1200 Hz and that spectral/level differences
dominated the higher frequencies. Small, repeated
transients proved very effective for spatialization
while beds of noise in the white realm could mutate
in various ways when put through HRTF panners.
Many sounds were replaced immediately because
we could hear the effect of the mix when designing
them.
As mentioned earlier we wanted to slightly
emphasize some sounds in the viewing direction and
for that purpose the Focus feature of the 3Dception
engine was used. It applies a level difference for a
selectable area of the viewing direction and gives the
Björling, Thorsell
viewer the opportunity to single out certain sounds
or pieces of dialogue by looking in that direction.
Since this very clearly means leaving the realistic
domain it’s a matter of taste how effects like these
should be applied, and what level of realism is
required to avoid distracting the viewer. In the case
of this production, the Focus feature provided a way
for the viewer to focus on the selected action,
especially in the scenes with several pieces of
dialogue taking place simultaneously around us. It
also helped enhancing the sense of things moving
out of focus and continuing behind us when looking
around. All in all we wanted to encourage the viewer
to look around in the scenes and discover the many
small details that contribute to the story.
In summary, we were somewhat surprised that we
ended up using so few ambisonic recordings in favor
of constructing a soundscape in a more traditional
feature film style for this project. That said, we don’t
feel that this is a clear path and depending on the
circumstances it might prove more suited to use only
ambisonic recordings on other projects.
9. Room for improvement
We’re always keen on improving existing
workflows and finding ways to make things sound
better and in this case there are a couple of things
we’d like to see as the technology evolves.
We’d really like a way to isolate certain sounds from
the general mechanics of the spatial engine. For
example it would have been really nice to put the
sound of an air conditioner so that it’s only heard
when looking up. We wouldn’t care that much for
realistic binaural spatialization of a sound like that
since it would mean hearing it constantly through
the scene and just adding to the general noise level.
But a touch of it, panned at the correct elevation by
HRTF when looking up, would have helped to
invoke curiosity and perhaps the desire to explore
other areas of the scene. There might even be room
for dynamically mixing layers of music depending
on the viewing direction with the intent of guiding
the viewer towards looking in a certain direction to
catch some action that will appear in a moment.
AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,
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Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways
Figure 3. Desired placement of air conditioning
sound—not used in the final mix.
All of these things were of course possible in an
object based system such as a game engine at the
time and there’s a strong appeal in the possibility to
declare logic rules for sound playback but for a
cinematic VR experience of this length and
complexity it didn’t seem quite realistic to use a
game engine like Unity or Unreal for sound within
the given time frame.
Systems like Dolby Atmos© for VR looked very
promising but weren’t released at the time of this
production. Currently our dream system for creating
immersive audio for cinematic VR experiences
would be a combination of linear channels with solid
sync and timeline scrolling like in a traditional
DAW, combined with the object based flexibility
and programmable logic control of a powerful game
engine. We’d really like to be able to build custom
reflection patterns by defining the shape and
materials of the surrounding walls as well as placing
objects for correct sound occlusion where
applicable.
As for the playback format we targeted our in-house
developed app on a Unity base which meant that we
could use all the features offered by the 3Dception
rendering engine. Following the release, the desire
to publish the experience on YouTube360 was
expressed and this showed us another field of
potential improvement: There are several systems
for spatial audio reproduction in use today, but many
of them are incompatible with each other. The
3Dception mix had to be converted to the first order
ambisonic format that YouTube required (ACN
channel order using four channels and SN3D
normalization (2)) which meant that we would lose
not only the Focus aspect of the mix but even more
crucial - the static layer for non-diegetic sounds.
These things made the mix of course sound radically
different on YouTube compared to the app.
Björling, Thorsell Crafting cinematic high end VR audio for Etihad Airways

While a standardization of playback formats for the

different platforms is probably utopian, the current
situation makes for some annoying obstacles when
publishing across all the desired destinations. And
who doesn’t want to see (and hear!) their film on all
available channels?

Also on the subject of playback: Binaural stereo

comes across as a very practical solution because of
the compatibility with widespread hardware but
there is room for improvement when it comes to
calibrating the output to the individual anatomy of
the listener. Our tests have shown that different
people listening to the same binaural recording
perceive the spatial orientation quite differently.
This might be caused by several things but one of
them is most likely individual head and pinna
anatomy. A way of measuring these properties and
applying the closest matching HRTF dataset for
playback would be a very interesting prospect.

And last but not least, learning more about the

physics of sound, psychoacoustics and the principles
of human hearing is more important than ever when
mixing sound for VR experiences.

References
1. Airbus S.A.S., “A380 specifications”
http://www.airbus.com/aircraftfamilies/passe
ngeraircraft/a380family/specifications/

2. Youtube, “Use spatial audio in 360-degree

and VR videos”
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6
395969?hl=en

AES Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2016 September 30–October 1,

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