Matthew to present at AES Nashville

Matthew will be presenting a workshop at the Audio Engineering Society convention in Nashville, focusing on his work in binaural music production. The  50-minute workshop, Breaking Through Binaural Boundaries, will be presented at 3:00 PM in the Ryman Studio 8 – Level 0, with Matthew’s co-presenters Todd Hooge of Sonic Forest Studios; and Michael Harris, Matthew’s longtime engineer and the mixing engineer for much of his binaural production including his fully-binaural album, Full Circle.

Following is the description for the workshop.

In the past, most binaural music was recorded live in reverberant spaces. Lien recognized early on that binaural multi-tracking afforded advantages over live recording, but noted that artificial reverb caused the immersive quality to collapse when applied to binaural recordings. Lien began experimenting with binaural convolution reverb using the Neumann KU-100 microphone to capture impulse responses (IRs) at 45-degree angles which were then matched directionally with binaural studio performances, allowing Lien to impose varying spatial qualities onto each binaural (stereo) track while enhancing the overall immersive impression by maintaining alignment of early reflections in binaural IRs and binaural studio performances. See Lien’s AES eBrief, EB5-5 “Space Explorations: Broadening Binaural Horizons with Directionally-Matched Impulse Response Convolution Reverb” for more information on this technique. For his 25th self-titled album, Full Circle, Lien travelled across Canada, Europe and southeast Asia capturing impulse responses for use on the album’s diverse instrumentation. Notably, this also infused culturally significant acoustics into the music by, for example, imparting the acoustics of St. Florian Basilica’s Marble Hall, or St. Martin’s Church (the oldest Christian church in the English-speaking world). Recording industry luminaries such as Elliot Scheiner, S. Husky Höskulds, Tchad Blake and others have praised the immersive quality of Full Circle, mastered by Grammy-winning immersive mastering engineer Michael Romanowski. In May 2026 — with the blessings of the Archdiocese — Lien captured directional binaural IRs within Munich’s Frauenkirche Cathedral with the support of AES members Klaus Kaetel and Daniel Bärschneider of IES GmbH Innovative Electronic Systems and Molecular Acoustics GmbH, to provide a robust documentation of the cathedral’s acoustics. The Tutorial In this 60-minute tutorial, Lien and colleagues Paul Gatien and Todd Hooge will use audio (over headphones) and video to demonstrate the immersive qualities of binaural impulse responses, and the effectiveness of matching directional IRs with binaural studio recordings. They will also demonstrate how they ovecame challenges that had previously vexed engineers attempting binaural pop music production (i.e. recording drums and bass), as well as other techniques such as binaural re-amping and the binaural sampling of a 1000-year-old Chinese lithophone