Katarina Hagstedt

When I first heard about the AMBEO VR Mic, I was intrigued to find ways to use it for my work. What I love about producing audio is that it is such a visual medium, allowing the listener to use his or her own imagination to add the missing pieces to the story. Since such experiences can be enhanced by the Ambisonic mic, I was eager to try it. I wanted to see if I as a storyteller could push my limits on how I connect with the listener to my work.

With that being said, as a podcaster mainly focusing on the story output and not having the special expertise of the technology of the mics, I wanted to include the mic usage into my workflow as natural as I could in order to assess how likely I would be to use it for additional stories.

One of the stories I was working on at the moment came to mind - about our relationship to the internet. A part of the piece included illustrating all the thoughts going through our heads when we are challenged to live without internet for a week, and I wanted to see if the AMBEO VR Mic could help me enhance that experience of “thoughts floating through your head”.

It was important for me to test the mic in a quite seamless way, that fit into my regular recordings and workflow. I decided to test the mic for a segment of my story, where I wanted to illustrate thoughts, or so-called voices in our heads and what they are telling us. Since we didn’t have access to a studio at the moment for the test, we decided to do it in a regular conference room. I gathered the group of people in a room where they were talking around the mic. I found the AMBEO VR Mic very easy to use. After that I converted the files in Sennheiser’s tool and added them to my mix. It was relatively easy. I chose to skew the sounds slightly as well in order to increase the “in your head” feeling.