6 Months After: POST-ORPHEUS Activities

There’s life after a project’s end – at least for ORPHEUS. And we have to say, in the last six months since the official termination on May 31 2018, we’ve been still very busy at various occasions, presenting results, demoing the app and even initiating small follow-ups and collaborations. Here’s a summary:

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.