SALT LAKE CITY — “While my friend’s sharpening the chainsaw blade, I hopped on KSL, and the Seventh-day Adventists were selling all their pews down in West Jordan.”
Greg Wood wasn’t building a church, exactly. But there are a lot of parallels: a communal experience, a collective focus, a kind of piety. And, of course, music.
“The space has a certain reverence to me, I think,” he told the Deseret News.
A few blocks north of downtown, Wood has helped build Envelop SLC, an immersive listening experience that utilizes 360-degree “spatial audio,” an increasingly popular high-tech audio format. Attendees at Envelop SLC sit themselves in the aforementioned pews, which are placed within a circle of 32 large speakers. Spatial audio technology allows an audio file’s individual channels to be positioned at any point within a “spherical mix.” The more speakers, the more customizable the mix. Sound can hit you from the left, the right, or behind you, or above and below you, at all kinds of different angles. It is stereo mixing to the nth degree.
Envelop SLC had a temporary run last winter, but is opening as a permanent space on Friday. Opening night will feature a special “sound bath” listening experience. The festivities continue on Aug. 24 with a free afternoon intro, a live evening performance by Envelop founder and musician Christopher Willits, then a DJ set by The Ride.
Willits founded Envelop in 2014, and its flagship San Francisco location has hosted hundreds of special events — live performances, sound baths, replayings of classic albums — over the past few years. Before it came to Salt Lake last winter, the Envelop team built an elaborate portable Envelop rig that could be taken to festivals and other special events. Greg Wood helped with its construction, and said they realized it just works better indoors, in more controlled environments.
“We don’t necessarily want to be a sideshow at a festival. And that’s kind of what it tended to be,” he said.
Wood, who’s lived in Utah his entire life, began working with Envelop to build a more permanent site in Salt Lake. Willits said Salt Lake became an ideal expansion spot: Utah’s blossoming tech sector, its relative proximity to San Francisco, a “strong creative energy” between he and Wood. The Salt Lake spot will be Envelop’s first permanent location outside of San Francisco. According to Willits, Envelop frequently gets requests from all over the world, “And we’re really pumping the brakes on all of that, just because we want to give as much love and attention and focus to Salt Lake City as we can,” he said.
When the company launched in 2014, Willits said he and his partners realized they needed more than a building and speakers. They also needed greater control of the audio they were showcasing. In time, they created Envelop for Live, a special audio mixing software specifically for spatial audio. Willits estimates this software has been downloaded by more than 20,000 people worldwide.
“There’s so many design elements of this that are just inspiring and humbling at the same time,” Willits said. “It’s really cool how it’s scaleable. That’s the power of spatial audio: Anything you mix in spatial audio can be scaled to numerous listening environments.”
Certain aspects of spatial audio technology are radically new. But its history dates back to early two-channel stereo mixing. In the 1970s, quadraphonic audio (often referred to as 4.0 surround sound) expanded on this idea, but didn’t catch on commercially during those years. Dolby continued this development with 5.1 surround sound, which became the standard for movies but not so much with music. Spatial audio, which Willits said has gained momentum over the past five years, is the newest iteration of an idea decades in the making.
The technology, especially in a space like Envelop’s, isn’t just great for new recordings, though. Anything that’s been developed for a spatial mix, even just two-channel stereo recordings, can sound quite compelling when mixed for Envelop’s 32-speaker setup. Some of the previous Salt Lake events included landmark recordings like the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
“We’re always kind of pushing the next edge of where music can go,” Willits said. “But it’s really cool to know that music made in 1960 still sounds incredibly good.”
Just as movies outpaced music in 5.1 surround sound use, modern spatial audio is catching on in virtual and augmented reality, perhaps more so than in music. But with VR, Willits said, “a lot of those experiences are quite isolated from other human beings.” Spaces like Envelop use spatial audio for a more communal experience, “allowing technology to create a better future for us,” he said, “allowing these experiences that are tech-driven to bring us together more, instead of separating or isolating us.”
Amen.
If you go …
What: Envelop SLC grand opening
When: Aug. 23 at 7 p.m.; Aug. 24 at 1, 7 and 9 p.m.
Where: Envelop SLC, 660 N. 300 West
How much: $25-$30 for individual events
Info: envelop.us/slc