Pierre-Marie Blind, audio designer and director of the Bande sonore studio, reminds us that sound is often underestimated in immersive experiences, even though it is a key vector. Trained in classical music, he discovered in 2012 the power of sound to anchor immersion in VR, where binaural listening creates a “sonic skin” at 360°, well beyond the frontal experience of cinema. For him, sound is also an economic prototyping tool: recreating a forest atmosphere through a sound collage costs much less than modeling each visual detail. Faced with the challenges of headsets in mixed reality (such as Apple Vision Pro), it advocates a refined approach, avoiding overload to preserve natural interaction with the real environment. Pioneer with The Listener’s Lexicon, a database of 600 terms to describe sound textures, he also warns about the risks of AI, which could marginalize the craft of sound. Finally, he encourages future talents to cultivate their uniqueness and calls on industry to achieve greater parity in a sector that is still too masculine.
The art of immersive sound in XR: meeting with Pierre-Marie Blind