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Fränk Zimmer, "musikprotokoll" producer and co-curator #65 How does audio streaming work? The festival for contemporary and experimental music "musikprotokoll", produced by Radio Österreich 1 and ORF Steiermark, tested a new kind of streaming at its 53rd edition. While the change from SD to HD and 4k resolutions is a recurring theme in image recordings, little seems to be known about current forms of play of the associated soundtrack. Even before the corona pandemic of our days, there was livestreaming of concerts with image and sound - at "musikprotokoll", by the way, for the first time in 1997.

With dynamic streaming, the head movements of the listeners are tracked in real
time. By moving one's own head, the spatial representation of what is heard changes and an amazingly realistic sound experience is created. With a comput er, webcam and headphones, everyone could experience this new way of hearing from home. Together with the "IEM - Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics" of the University of Music in Graz, the concert surround recordings of the ORF were encoded as binaural audio files for dynamic streaming and supplemented by an image track, which was recorded with seven cameras, and put online for one month.

In another project - "tingles & clicks", dynamic streaming was established beyond the documentary as the central experience category of the online project. Seven European composers created sound objects that could be explored in sound spaces by visitors navigating through them with their heads. In the future, this technology will increasingly enter the mainstream. Electronics companies have long since reacted - headphones with tracking capabilities including smartphones that can process the data are already on the market. What is missing is processed content. In the course of the future digitalization of the playout channels of ORF radio and thus also of Ö1 - keyword "ORF Player" - not only the quantity and findability of the digital offers should play a role, but increasingly also their acoustic quality and extended possibilities.