Innovation in the field of streaming listening has benefited from a strong acceleration in recent times. There listening quality, which until a few years ago was reduced to a minimum, with mp3 files that, due to the need for compression, greatly reduced the depth of the sound, has gradually increased and has even grown exponentially, bringing all the main players on the market to offer its subscribers high-resolution listening, lossless audio, a form of compression that preserves all the original data, but also, in the case of Apple, technologies related to Dolby Atmos (surround sound which supports up to 128 sound objects and does not use 5 +1 channels as before), such as Spatial Audio.
With the arrival of the new iOS15, Apple takes another step forward, also adding a new feature, that of Head Tracking. What is that? Let’s take a practical example: when we listen to music with the home stereo system, the music comes to our ears from the place where the speakers are placed and if we turn our heads or move, the sound always comes from the same position. With the Spatial Audio, the sound comes from many more sources at the same time in a completely immersive experience, and if we move our head, with headphones or earphones, the sound moves with us.
Head Tracking also allows you to to make this listening dynamic: depending on how we move our head, the position of the sound objects does not change, as it happens in listening to the stereo or in concerts, as it happens in the natural listening to sounds or noises in our daily life. The step forward is remarkable and, as always happens in the world of musical technologies, it is not only interesting for the listener but also for those who create and find themselves able to use a new way to place sounds in space by creating immersive sound scenarios never heard before. All using headphones or earphones, the AirPods Max or the highly anticipated new AirPods 3, calibrated to give the best of Cupertino’s new technologies.
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by Bruno Ruffilli
More attention to classical music
Apple’s renewed focus on music and sound is largely due to Apple’s overall growth in services, which are now part of the company’s core business. And music, which has been in Apple’s DNA since the days of the iPod (the true ancestor of the iPhone), had had limited attention for far too long. Now, however, it has returned to the center of the Cupertino initiatives and it has been noticed not so much and not only with the arrival of Spatial Audio and now Head Tracking, but also with the very important acquisition of Primephonic, a streaming platform dedicated to classical music, indeed not a platform, but the best platform dedicated to classical music. The acquisition is not only due to the desire to conquer space in the classical music market but, even more, as noted by the Washington Post, it should serve to transfer Primephonic’s DNA to Apple Music. Primephonic is a young and small company, with a very limited user base if we look at the numbers from the perspective of Apple Music, and no great innovative capacity on the technology front. But it has an approach to streaming that is, basically, perfect for those who love music, putting together quality, ability to discover new music, curation and attention to metadata, things that are often not all together in the most successful streaming platforms.
Apple’s acquisition of Primephonic is a bet on the future, a future in which streaming services will win not so much for the amount of songs they make available to their users and perhaps not even for exclusives (as video platforms do). but how they will offer music to their listeners. Currently, not everything is perfect in the platforms, often you look for a song and another comes out, the information on composers, performers and albums is skimpy and sometimes null, which in the field of classical music is problematic because the listener would like to know which movement from which symphony he is listening to, who is the conductor or the orchestra and without this data, indeed metadata, it is also difficult to find what you want to hear. Of course, for the Top 40 singles and for the vast majority of the public all this is relatively useful, in fact the streaming services up to now have largely done without it, but for classic rock fans, for example, the need is much more. great. Let’s say you want to listen Get Back of the Beatles, it would be interesting to know which versions the system offers me, the original, the remastered version, the demo version, the one sung by George Harrison? Primephonic has done a great job on the world of metadata and Apple Music will certainly benefit from it, especially in improving the search and advice service. And Primephonic’s corporate culture, with its own playlists created by humans and not by algorithms (which is obviously also in Apple Music’s DNA and has been enhanced by Apple Music 1), its attention to information could lead to a sensational growth of the informative side of the service, with liner notes, or comments, or reviews made by experts or musicians. In short, make sure that Apple Music is not only a place to listen to music or discover it, but also to read it and deepen it.
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Not just quality or depth, however, Apple continues to think about everyone and in particular those who consume music many hours a day for no other reason than pleasure and entertainment. So there are many new features of iOS15 that can interest this group of consumers, one of which we like to highlight, sharing within FaceTime with Share Play, or the possibility of sharing music while connected via FaceTime with friends, colleagues and relatives. It is a small, but curious innovation, precisely because it brings out the concept of listening alone and with headphones and brings music back to the center of the concept of community. Other new features are Story Sharing, which allows you to share your favorite music in Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat stories, and Lyric Sharing, to split short snippets of song lyrics. But Apple Music is now also integrated with the Photo App, to create soundtracks to our memories. We’ll see if it succeeds, but it’s still another interesting change in today’s digital listening field.
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