I’m hesitant to even start out by calling this a “reverb,” as it’s almost a whole system in and of itself. MNTRA Instruments has teamed up with Outer Echo and GPU Audio to bring Living Sky, a spatial reverb powered by your computer's GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as opposed to your CPU. The spaces they include in Living Sky each comprise hundreds of impulse responses that interact together in a given acoustic field. It's an absolutely insane premise, and after using it for over a month on a bunch of Dolby Atmos projects, I have to say it absolutely delivers everything it says and more. There’s a bit of a learning curve and a lot going on, but I promise it’s worth the effort in the end.
There’s just no way I can give you a thorough introduction to Living Sky; it’s too substantial. “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” I think the best place to start is ambisonics. Living Sky exists inside an ambisonic environment for all its acoustic spaces. In fact, MNTRA designed their own custom arrays in order to capture them. Ambisonic resolution can go all the way up to fifth order, which can make a big difference depending on your final delivery format. Ambisonics are speaker agnostic – this means seamless translation and flexibility for pretty much anything you could need. Past that simple explanation, things get a lot more complicated.
From here, you can start to not only craft your own custom spaces (and combine multiple spaces together inside one instance of Living Sky), but you can even control and place each object/source you send into Living Sky. These aren’t just static either; everything starts to interact in real time depending on how you place or automate each source. This is the point where it might seem this kind of complexity would be impossible to wrangle inside a single plug-in window. One of the most brilliant and unique things MNTRA has done with Living Sky is design a separate 3D Control App that can run in the background to help visualize all of this in real time. Along the same lines as the Renderer window in Dolby Atmos, the Control App gives you an ambisonic sphere that helps visualize where energy is being pushed in the reverberant environment, as well as physical sources you’re sending into Living Sky. This is where you can see your automation and placement in the space you’ve created.
Two other very unique features in Living Sky are the Modulation section and Aura. When you have the chance to start deep diving and automating various parameters, MNTRA makes it easy to get some amazing results by using modulation curves to control your automation. That’s a new one for me, but it didn’t take long to realize what I’ve been missing all these years. Aura is also really unique, as it starts to physically “reshape” the spatial character of your space. Between those two controls, you can really start to direct where you want your reverb to be more prominent and how it travels.
One of my favorite features with Living Sky is how easy it is to place multi-mic arrays into the plug-in and have them accurately interact with the modeled spaces. I was able to take some recordings with my 7.0.4 mic, have each channel show up in Living Sky as an individual “source,” and use their 7.1.4 preset to instantly translate that array accurately into any of their modeled spaces. I think a lot of engineers working immersively in classical music are going to find features like that (and the ease of workflow) pretty astonishing.
This is barely scratching the surface, but I hope you understand at this point that Living Sky isn’t just a reverb plug-in. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at it as an almost living organism, and as such it will demand some time and effort to understand it and get the most out of it. I’m pretty shocked by some of the results I’m getting out of Living Sky; it really does seem like the next step in what a reverb can be.