Episode 123 Dan Barry (Spatial Audio & AI)
Announcement
We’re excited to share that we’ll be presenting “Audible Dimensions: Expanding Story Through Spatial Audio” at SXSW 2026 in Texas.
Our panel will be moderated by the creative lead at Resonant Interactions and Immersive Audio Podcast co-host, Monica Bolles, and will feature special guests: The Director of Content Creation & Distribution Solutions at Dolby Laboratories, David Gould. The Director of Immersive Media at Meta – Eric Cheng. Senior Sound Technologist for Immersive Media at 1.618 DIGITAL – Oliver Kadel. As storytelling expands into extended reality media, such as immersive films, VR, MR, AI glasses and location-based installations, spatial audio is emerging as one of the key narrative forces.
With today’s advanced head-mounted display technology, audiences expect not just 3D visuals but equally rich immersive sound that conveys presence, space and movement. This panel explores the latest innovation in immersive sound technology and practical application from three different perspectives: software and hardware capabilities of hosting platforms, the spatial audio formats and content production workflows that bring these experiences to life.
See you soon in Austin!
Summary
In this episode of the Immersive Audio Podcast, Monica Bolles is joined by the software engineer and researcher – Dan Barry from Dublin, Ireland. We discuss Dan’s work and research in digital signal processing, data analytics and AI machine learning for projects centred around spatial psychoacoustics and sound source separation for music.
Dan is a 4-time startup founder with a PhD in audio signal processing. Throughout his career, he has focused on translating academic research into products, spinouts and licenses. In 2006, he established the Audio Research Group in the Dublin Institute of Technology and served as the manager there until 2011. The group grew to 12 researchers and produced a wide body of published work in music, speech, and audio signal processing, including several patents. In 2007, he licensed his audio source separation patent to Sony for use in the popular game Singstar on the PlayStation 3.
In 2011, he co-founded the music education startup, Riffstation, where he served as CEO until 2015, when it was acquired by Fender, where he served as Vice President of Research and Development. In 2018, he left Fender and co-founded the spatial upmixing company, VRX Audio.
He returned to academia in 2020 and took up a research position at QxLab within the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at UCD. During that appointment, he designed and delivered Go Listen, an online subjective listening test platform which has been widely adopted by academia and industry. In 2021, he co-founded another startup, GuitarApp, which now provides free online guitar lessons and tools to over 350,000 visitors monthly.
Show Notes
Binamix: A Python Library for Generating Binaural Audio Datasets.
BINAQUAL: A Full-Reference Objective Localisation Similarity Metric for Binaural Audio.
Binaspect: A Python Library for Binaural Audio Analysis, Visualisation & Feature Generation.
Systematic Evaluation of Time-Frequency Features for Binaural Sound Source Localisation.
EgoMusic: An Egocentric Augmented Reality Glasses Dataset for Music.
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Credits
This episode was produced by Oliver Kadel and Emma Rees and included music by Rhythm Scott.