Any time some pretentious audio engineer with access to novelty studio equipment or plugins l, it is customary to share some exposition about the creative process.

My most recent track, "No More Cassandras" is my first Dolby Atmos track released to streaming services. Spatial Audio versions of a few of my older tracks exist but are victim to the consequences of my learning curve.

For this track, I mixed it with Ableton Live using Fiedler Audio's Dolby Composer setup. In order to claim defeat over the lords of the loudness wars, I used their Mastering Console as well.

Talk about Humanoid, Dolby Composer, spatial audio philosophies. Talk about the "beds" in dolby beam to dolby composer. Discuss sound objects in physical space and compare them to channels

For mixing, I have a quaint ableton live setup. Some granulators, some midi instruments. I got a big bundle a few holidays ago. I put Baby Audio's Humanoid plugin over some strings. Makes it spooky. You have 6 channels of me playing a midi keyboard improvised over three takes spread out in a 3D space with very few other effect plugins. I used the gravitas mds plugin for some cohesiveness. For the noisy dish track, I added some spread in the Dolby Composer to its channels. As you can see, I did use the bow slider, at all. Maybe next time.

There's one send channel called "Bed." This is where I put a dummy 7.1.2 channel track because that's a requirement for the Apple Music deliverable. I don't put audio in discreet channels because I think it's important to use object-based audio as is pretty much the entire point of using Dolby Atmos in the first place.

I typically mix my music in bizarre ways in order to experiment with various bone conduction qualia. If you've listened to my album anDeath using headphones you can attest to this. So many different things coming at you in different directions that it's hard for your brain to really do anything but feel overwhelmed. That was not the goal here; I wanted to ensure that this would pass inspection and receive ingestion.

So I played it safe. I'm starting to admit to myself that sometimes less is more. Textures are a core part of my work, so I'm not completely inclined to force disparate tones on you just for the sake of sounding as wacky as possible.

Talk about loudness wars, how difficult it can be for many noise musicians to self-publish on streaming sites, how there's very few noise artists doing this, talk about how deliverables work.

When you're mixing at 96khz Dolby Atmos you have quite a bit of headroom for sounds to be dynamic without being physically painful to the human ear. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the short version. The deliver has to be at -18 LKFS and -1 dbTP. Apparently there are standards one must follow and "do no harm" has to be one of them. That includes ear drums as well as speakers. Much to my chagrin, but I digress.

I don't really have to do much hear because we can run gravitas mds with a nice mastering preset, and then run a measuring process against the entire track.

As you can see by the wavform in the image, I did not go ham on this track. I did not do any panning automation, I mostly just focused on spatialization aspect, keeping things separated enough to where you'd feel enveloped and consumed by the right parts of my track in the right parts of your body. Again, experimenting with bone conduction and the textures that benchmark their qualia.

I take my 96 khz Dolby Atmos mix, and then apply some filters and then render a 96khz stereo file as well as a 48khz Dolby Atmos master. The hi-res stereo master is worth listening to simply because it still uses Dolby's maths for its binaural rendering. At the end of the day, they are two completely different experiences. The Dolby Atmos streaming version makes me feel all sorts of things the stereo version doesn't.

I plan on making a full album where I explore a few different arrangements and also bring back some more power electronics aspects that were absent in the markedly more death industrial way of things.

There does not seem to be much of an interest in spatial audio in my community outside of pretentious academic noise acts (myself included?) and the more commercialized avant-garde / experimental acts, many of whome release on their own formats that do not expressly use the Dolby Atmos workflow.

While the codec supports 128 objects, 10 of them are used by the dummy bed. I doubt I will want to place 118 sound objects in space, but I will definitely have an album sometime in the next year that has much more than 6 objects positioned around you. I also did not use back speakers or the ceiling speakers just to play it safe. That will change.

No More Cassandras - Single by Scarlet Death on Apple Music

Listen to No More Cassandras - Single by Scarlet Death on Apple Music. 2026. 1 Song. Duration: 6 minutes.

https://music.apple.com

You can find the Dolby Atmos track available on Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music HD.

Any time some pretentious audio engineer with access to novelty studio equipment or plugins l, it is customary to share some exposition about the creative process.

My most recent track, "No More Cassandras" is my first Dolby Atmos track released to streaming services. Spatial Audio versions of a few of my older tracks exist but are victim to the consequences of my learning curve.

For this track, I mixed it with Ableton Live using Fiedler Audio's Dolby Composer setup. In order to claim defeat over the lords of the loudness wars, I used their Mastering Console as well.

Talk about Humanoid, Dolby Composer, spatial audio philosophies. Talk about the "beds" in dolby beam to dolby composer. Discuss sound objects in physical space and compare them to channels

For mixing, I have a quaint ableton live setup. Some granulators, some midi instruments. I got a big bundle a few holidays ago. I put Baby Audio's Humanoid plugin over some strings. Makes it spooky. You have 6 channels of me playing a midi keyboard improvised over three takes spread out in a 3D space with very few other effect plugins. I used the gravitas mds plugin for some cohesiveness. For the noisy dish track, I added some spread in the Dolby Composer to its channels. As you can see, I did use the bow slider, at all. Maybe next time.

There's one send channel called "Bed." This is where I put a dummy 7.1.2 channel track because that's a requirement for the Apple Music deliverable. I don't put audio in discreet channels because I think it's important to use object-based audio as is pretty much the entire point of using Dolby Atmos in the first place.

I typically mix my music in bizarre ways in order to experiment with various bone conduction qualia. If you've listened to my album anDeath using headphones you can attest to this. So many different things coming at you in different directions that it's hard for your brain to really do anything but feel overwhelmed. That was not the goal here; I wanted to ensure that this would pass inspection and receive ingestion.

So I played it safe. I'm starting to admit to myself that sometimes less is more. Textures are a core part of my work, so I'm not completely inclined to force disparate tones on you just for the sake of sounding as wacky as possible.

Talk about loudness wars, how difficult it can be for many noise musicians to self-publish on streaming sites, how there's very few noise artists doing this, talk about how deliverables work.

When you're mixing at 96khz Dolby Atmos you have quite a bit of headroom for sounds to be dynamic without being physically painful to the human ear. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the short version. The deliver has to be at -18 LKFS and -1 dbTP. Apparently there are standards one must follow and "do no harm" has to be one of them. That includes ear drums as well as speakers. Much to my chagrin, but I digress.

I don't really have to do much hear because we can run gravitas mds with a nice mastering preset, and then run a measuring process against the entire track.

As you can see by the wavform in the image, I did not go ham on this track. I did not do any panning automation, I mostly just focused on spatialization aspect, keeping things separated enough to where you'd feel enveloped and consumed by the right parts of my track in the right parts of your body. Again, experimenting with bone conduction and the textures that benchmark their qualia.

I take my 96 khz Dolby Atmos mix, and then apply some filters and then render a 96khz stereo file as well as a 48khz Dolby Atmos master. The hi-res stereo master is worth listening to simply because it still uses Dolby's maths for its binaural rendering. At the end of the day, they are two completely different experiences. The Dolby Atmos streaming version makes me feel all sorts of things the stereo version doesn't.

I plan on making a full album where I explore a few different arrangements and also bring back some more power electronics aspects that were absent in the markedly more death industrial way of things.

There does not seem to be much of an interest in spatial audio in my community outside of pretentious academic noise acts (myself included?) and the more commercialized avant-garde / experimental acts, many of whome release on their own formats that do not expressly use the Dolby Atmos workflow.

While the codec supports 128 objects, 10 of them are used by the dummy bed. I doubt I will want to place 118 sound objects in space, but I will definitely have an album sometime in the next year that has much more than 6 objects positioned around you. I also did not use back speakers or the ceiling speakers just to play it safe. That will change.

No More Cassandras - Single by Scarlet Death on Apple Music

Listen to No More Cassandras - Single by Scarlet Death on Apple Music. 2026. 1 Song. Duration: 6 minutes.

https://music.apple.com

You can find the Dolby Atmos track available on Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music HD.