Imagine being able to create content that harnesses the loudspeakers in everyday devices all around us – in our smartphones, tablets and laptops - to play out a fully immersive audio experience. Whether you want to create a captivating surround sound piece for the home or an innovative installation at an event, Audio Orchestrator gives you a chance to experiment and deliver a listening experience like no other to your audience. The tool's unique creation process ensures that the experience can adapt to fit any number and many different types of devices - even if this changes during listening.

Developed by BBC R&D, Audio Orchestrator allows you to take your audio projects and rework them into interactive, 360°, spatial audio that envelops your listeners in sound - from above, from behind, sending sound to one, many or all connected devices to tell your story in a new and unique way.

Audio Orchestrator was part of the BBC R&D Audio Team’s wider work on creating personalised and immersive listening experiences - and the tools to deliver these experiences.

We learnt a lot from evaluating audience responses to our first experience for orchestrated devices: The Vostok-K Incident. We used interaction logs to look at the time that listeners spent with The Vostok-K Incident including the number of extra devices they connected and how they used the different options on the interface.

The results suggested that there is value in this approach to delivering audio drama: 79% of respondents loved or liked using phones as speakers, and 85% would use the technology again. The interaction results gave helpful pointers for future experiences, suggesting that we should aim to get the greatest possible benefit out of few connected devices, ensure that content is impactful right from the start, and explore different types of user interaction. As well as this large scale public trial, we have also performed controlled user testing and follow up interviews.