Recently heralded as “remarkable… sound-engineering wizardry” by the New York Times, Audionamix’s sound separation technology has opened the floodgates to new entertainment experiences. Using state-of-the-art techniques, ADX extracted the musical score from the Academy Award-winning film West Side Story, leaving the voices and sound effects intact. The New York Philharmonic then breathed new life into this beloved classic, as Forbes Magazine reports, our “new sound technology has isolated the film’s dialogue and vocal tracks, enabling an orchestra to accompany a screening of it in real time.”

In describing our work on West Side Story to the New York Times, Audionamix CEO Olivier Attia explained that the technique involves sampling sound waves for instruments and then instructing a computer to scrub out their appearances on the soundtrack. The end result was nothing short of miraculous.

Our technology opens up a whole new world of hybrid entertainment, combining a cinema experience with a live orchestra performance. This application of ADX Technology is only the tip of the iceberg. More and more, creators and innovators are imagining new ways to use ADX Technology to create truly phenomenal experiences.

The next performance of West Side Story will be in Chicago on November 26, 2011. If you are interested in attending this singular audio experience, please click here for more information and to purchase tickets.

You can read the full text of the NYT and Forbes articles by clicking here. To see our work on West Side Story in action, click here.

Audionamix is proud to announce our newest addition to our proprietary source separation services, Dialogue Isolation. This powerful service is used to separate dialogue from music and effects tracks. With this new advancement in ADX Technology, we have the ability to provide major motion picture studios with Dialogue Isolation for native and foreign feature films. The applications of this service and the value they provide to studios and audiences are boundless.

Our first challenge was to use this new service on the cult classic, “The Blues Brothers.” Using Dialogue Isolation we were able to separate the English dialogue from the music and effects tracks, allowing us to superimpose new French-, Italian-, German-, and Spanish-language dialogue tracks. The result is high-quality, high-fidelity audio tracks in multiple languages and in less time, enabling movie studios to easily distribute films internationally in true surround sound.

Just as Music Dissociation took the market by storm when it was released late last year, Dialogue Isolation has the potential to help back-catalog content owners re-release thousands of older titles and create new revenue streams that, otherwise, would not have existed.

In 2010, Audionamix took on a similar challenge by removing the music and effects from the classic horror film, Psycho, so that it could be mixed with new surround music and effects soundtrack, and then re-released on Blu-Ray with the 5.1 sound in every original language. You can view Audionamix’s work on Psycho by clicking here.

This past August, the Audionamix research team presented a publication at Interspeech 2011. Interspeech is the leading scientific conference on speech technologies and, as Audionamix continues to strive for excellence and innovation in this field, we welcomed the opportunity to share our knowledge with the larger community. The publication, entitled Phoneme-Level Text to Audio Synchronization on Speech Signals with Background Music, presented advances in automatic synchronization between text and the corresponding speech sounds. A chief focus of our current research, this paper provides original insights into speech-related services.

During the conference, our scientists in Signal Processing met with many key figures in sound technology to increase our expertise and deliver innovative audio solutions to the market. The Interspeech community traditionally focuses on the processing and recognition of isolated speech, so it is no surprise that the pioneering work of our research team piqued their interest! The ability of source separation technologies to eliminate interfering noise or music in order to enhance the soundscape has such wide and untapped potential that it proved a topic of significant interest. With Audionamix blazing the trail of sound separation applications, Audionamix has secured a place at the forefront of the field.

Please click here to view the research publication.