In classes we have been talking about mixing surround sounds as a method for achieving immersion for a sound piece and it has got be thinking a lot about applications in my personal medium of podcast audio drama, I feel that it is an interesting pathway for quite unique experiences within that medium however due to the specfic needs of 5.1/7.1 etc, it does not feel like it could/should develop into a massively widespread way of listening to audio drama.
5.1 is a 6 channel sound system which utilises a surround layout of 5 speakers (centre speaker, left and right front, left and right surround, and a subwoofer for bass) the 7.1 system adds and extra 2 speakers on the side. Before I start gushing about the positives and possibilities I should mention the issues and hinderances. To both mix and listen in 5.1/7.1 (herby referred to as just surround sound) requires a lot of equipment, at school there is a setup of a rack of inputs and outputs which allow the sound designer to route the various channels in their DAW to the speakers around the room, to listen in surround it requires less equipment but still needs the 6-8 speakers and the space to keep them in. More problems arise in the transmission of a piece of work in surround, you cant encode the instructions for a surround piece into a .WAV file and it must be encoded into a specific format, meaning you would not be able to transfer the surround mix over a podcasting platform.
That is not to say though that it is not possible to transfer a file with surround sound, it can be easily put into a transferrable file over the internet and so perhaps it would not work for regular episodes of a show but instead special episodes, season finales, Patreon specials and the like. In the spirit of this I’ve started to consider how I could incorporate surround mixing into Chain of Being, the season finale of the show is on the horizon and I’m thinking about how I can make it special. For a while now I’ve been thinking about how to make it different, in terms of content and actual sound design. However since the possibility of surround mixing has been introduced to me I have been theorizing another way to make it unique. When the time comes to it I think I might mix it in 5.1 and hold a live listening, not everyone has a system capable of handling 5.1 and it would make for an interesting experience to have a live version. To make it slightly more accessible I could release an encoded file for those that have such systems at home, releasing it alongside the regular episode.
For now this is all speculation, there are lots of things that could provide an obstacle, it might not be artistically worth doing, feeling more like a novelty than anything but I will only be able to see in practice.