I'm a mastering engineer who fell in love with the idea of space in music.

For over two decades, I've worked across recording studios, live sound, acoustic design and mastering. The entire signal chain from microphone to speaker. Each discipline shaped how I think about space: recording taught me that spatial arrangement begins at the source; live sound taught me that immersive must translate across rooms of every size; acoustics taught me how the brain perceives position; mastering gave me an obsession with translation across formats. Now, I teach immersive audio at Middle Tennessee State University, and my experience impacts everything I do in the classroom.

The question that drives my teaching is How do you develop spatial thinking that persists when the tools inevitably change?

My answer: Ears before tools. Train perception first. Let the software follow.

 

Arriving With Confusion

Most students walk in thinking Dolby Atmos, spatial audio and immersive sound are the same thing. They're not. Atmos is a specific object-based format. Spatial audio is a broad concept, often conflated with Apple's processing. Immersive describes the experience, not the method.

This terminology mess reflects a larger problem in our field. Marketing language has replaced precise thinking. So, the first thing I do is slow down and untangle definitions. I love semantics but clear language enables rich creative decisions.

 

Close your Eyes and Listen

Before my students open a DAW, I send them outside.

In the Soundscape Observation assignment, they spend fifteen minutes in two environments (one indoor, one outdoor) and map what they hear. Where are sounds coming from? What's easy to localize? What's hard? Why?

When you close your eyes and attend to space in the real world, you stop thinking about panners and start thinking about perception. Elevation, distance, and position become felt and real, allowing technical parameters to create meaningful experiences. I practice this myself. I run without headphones. I hike. I attend acoustic concerts. Live acoustic music engages my senses in ways recordings cannot, reminding me what we're trying to capture. Actively focusing on the sounds around me, rather than drowning them out, recalibrates my hearing. It's a practice I return to constantly and one I try to instill in my students.

This semester, one student mapped her apartment: traffic from three directions, construction behind her, a refrigerator hum she'd never consciously noticed. She wrote about how her brain filtered out the constant sounds and only registered the “transients”. That's spatial listening in action, and she discovered it without any plugins.

By the end of the semester, we revisit these observations. Students are often surprised by how much more they notice. Their ears have changed. Their brains have changed.

 

The transformation I Track

In my intro class, I require listening journals throughout the semester. Eight entries analyzing spatial mixes across different formats. The evolution is measurable.

Early entries are reactions: "The vocals are wide." "There's height content". "I don't like the binaural". The class divides… some dislike binaural immediately, others are drawn to it. Opinions are strong but unexamined.

As the semester continues, something shifts. Students stop reacting and start analyzing. They begin finding songs where binaural works beautifully and can articulate why. How the intimacy serves a vocal, how the expansiveness supports a soundscape, when a mix draws you inward into a private experience versus when it places you among others in a shared space.

By the final entries, students aren't asking "Do I like this?" They're asking, Does this spatial choice serve the music's intent?. Context-dependent format preferences rise from near zero to nearly forty percent. I want them to learn how to speak the language. The spatial language, as we call it.

 

The Biggest Shift I've Witnessed

Sound has evolved from a technical necessity to the primary driver of emotional narrative. The invisible architect of a story's emotional arc. In music production, the producer's palette has expanded. We still capture ensembles in rooms. Look for the work of Morten Lindberg or Justin Gray to hear what immersive mic arrays can do, rendering acoustic space with stunning fidelity. But we can also construct environments that never existed, shaping psychological and emotional landscapes through spatial design. The evolution from stereo gave us both deeper truth in capture and new freedom in creation.

The move from stereo to 3D changed the relationship between sound and listener. We can now place audiences inside the scene rather than watching from outside. A melody can circle behind you, creating presence that stereo cannot achieve. This sense of being there is what makes an experience immersive.

 

Looking Ahead

Immersive audio is expanding into every corner of storytelling. From music, film, and live performance to games, podcasts, and XR. 

Creators need people who speak this language. That starts with ears before tools.

Close your eyes. Listen to the space you're in right now. Notice what's easy to locate, what's diffuse, what your brain filters out.

 

That's the first lesson. Everything else builds from there.