On January 26, 2026, MIT Technology Review published (via its Business Lab channel) an episode titled “The power of sound in a virtual world”. The conversation is hosted by MIT Technology Review Insights’ Laurel Ruma and features Erik Vaveris (Vice President of Product Management and Chief Marketing Officer at Shure) and Brian Scholl (Director of Yale University’s Perception & Cognition Laboratory). The premise is refreshingly blunt: we’ve spent years optimizing cameras, lighting, and virtual backgrounds, but the thing that actually determines whether people trust you, understand you, and feel connected to you is often the one thing everyone treats as an afterthought—sound. (Original RSS source and episode listing)
I couldn’t open the MIT Technology Review article page directly while researching this story (the site blocks automated access in some contexts), so I leaned on primary sources from the companies and research publishers mentioned, plus peer‑reviewed literature on extended reality (XR) audio. That’s not a limitation—it’s a reminder that audio is a real engineering discipline, not a vibes-based accessory you sprinkle on after shipping the “real” product.
Let’s unpack what this “power of sound” actually means in 2026, why it matters for VR/AR and for everyday Zoom life, what the underlying technologies are (spatial audio, HRTFs, room acoustics simulation, AI noise suppression, echo cancellation), and where the industry is headed—including some inconvenient truths about latency, personalization, and privacy.
Sound is not the side quest—it’s the main storyline
Visually, we live in an era of “good enough.” Even mid-range webcams are usable, and most meeting platforms now do some form of auto exposure, background blur, or AI framing. But audio is less forgiving. Humans will tolerate a grainy image. We will not tolerate speech we can’t parse, or voices that feel oddly “detached” from the person speaking, or that uncanny experience where someone’s lips move and your brain can’t quite lock onto the words.
This is partly physiological. Speech comprehension depends on timing cues, frequency detail, and stable signal-to-noise ratios. If noise reduction chews up consonants, your brain works harder. If echo cancellation fails, your brain gives up. And if spatial cues are wrong in VR, your brain gets the digital equivalent of motion sickness—except it’s auditory confusion: “Why does the sound say they’re behind me when the avatar is in front of me?”
In other words: if VR is the dream of “presence,” audio is the thing that convinces your nervous system that the dream is plausible. And in day-to-day hybrid work, audio is the thing that decides whether a meeting is a collaborative exchange or a slow-motion hostage situation.
The virtual world is already here. It’s called “meetings.”
The MIT Technology Review episode frames “virtual world” broadly: not just headsets, but the digital spaces where business, education, and casual conversations happen through screens. That framing is important because the same core problems show up across the spectrum:
- Where is the sound coming from? (localization and spatial cues)
- How “real” does the space feel? (room acoustics, reverb, occlusion)
- Can we understand each other? (speech intelligibility, noise, echo)
- Do we feel connected? (social presence, turn-taking cues)
XR and conferencing audio share a surprisingly large toolbox. Beamforming microphones, acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), dereverberation, and noise suppression show up in a corporate meeting room and in a VR capture rig. The difference is that XR adds more degrees of freedom: your head moves, the sources move, and ideally the sound field moves the way the real world would.
Spatial audio: the difference between “stereo” and “you are there”
“Spatial audio” gets marketed like a checkbox. In reality it’s a pile of psychoacoustics, geometry, signal processing, and hardware constraints that all need to cooperate. The goal is to deliver cues that your brain uses to locate sound sources: left/right (interaural level differences), timing differences (interaural time differences), and spectral shaping caused by your head and outer ear.
HRTFs: your ears are weird, and that’s the point
The spectral shaping part is modeled using Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs). They encode how your body—especially the pinna (outer ear)—filters sound depending on direction. The catch is that HRTFs are personal. Your ears are not identical to mine. So “generic HRTF” often works “okay,” but can break in subtle ways: front/back confusion, poor elevation cues, or a sound that feels inside your head rather than in the world.
Research continues to test how much personalization matters. A 2025 study looked at individualized vs non-individualized HRTFs and also tested the effect of head movement. Interestingly, it found individualized HRTFs improved perceived realism in one scenario but didn’t straightforwardly dominate across all conditions, and head movement changed outcomes—an example of how perception is a full system, not one knob. (Study on HRTF individualisation and head movements)
Head tracking: the “world-locked” illusion
Once you add head tracking, spatial audio stops being a static trick and becomes dynamic. Turn your head and the voice that’s “over there” should stay “over there.” If it rotates with you, you don’t perceive a stable external source; you perceive headphone audio. That difference—world-locked vs head-locked audio—is foundational for VR comfort and realism.
And here’s the punchline: head tracking and dynamic binaural rendering also matter outside VR. Products and platforms that simulate “spatial meetings” or that support multi-speaker conferencing can use spatial separation to reduce listening fatigue, improve turn taking, and make it easier to identify who is talking. That’s a human factors upgrade, not a gimmick.
Room acoustics: the part everyone forgets until the demo sounds fake
If you’ve ever heard a VR demo where every sound is “dry” and close, you’ve experienced the absence of acoustics modeling. Real spaces are defined by reflections: early reflections that give you geometry cues, and late reverberation that tells you whether you’re in a small office, a cathedral, or a stairwell that turns your footsteps into a minor horror soundtrack.
Modeling this in real time is expensive, especially on standalone headsets or mobile devices. But the field is moving. In 2025, researchers showed it’s possible to generate plausible spatial room impulse responses from limited measurements, reducing the number of expensive acoustic captures required. That matters because high-quality impulse responses are one of the best ways to make virtual spaces sound believable—convolution reverb is still the gold standard when you can afford it. (Perceptual evaluation of extrapolated spatial RIRs)
Even better, VR itself is becoming a platform for testing spatial audio algorithms. VR-PTOLEMAIC, for example, implements standardized perceptual testing methodologies inside a virtual environment to evaluate how different reconstruction algorithms are perceived by listeners. That’s not just meta—it’s practical. We can iterate faster if we can test faster. (VR-PTOLEMAIC perceptual testing environment)
AI audio processing: saving meetings (and sometimes ruining them)
Now for the part everyone has an opinion about, because everyone has been personally attacked by it: AI noise suppression.
Modern conferencing systems rely on a pipeline that includes:
- Noise reduction (constant noise like HVAC)
- AI denoising (non-stationary noises like keyboard clicks)
- Echo cancellation (removing speaker playback from mic capture)
- Automatic gain control (keeping levels sane)
- Beamforming (picking up the talker, rejecting the room)
When it works, it’s magic: people sound closer, clearer, and more human. When it fails, it’s a series of audio jump scares: pumping artifacts, robotic syllables, and the dreaded “you cut out every time you say an S.”
Shure has leaned into this space with its IntelliMix DSP ecosystem, including an “AI Denoiser” feature in IntelliMix Room software (designed to reduce random disruptive noises while preserving speech) and hardware/software products that bring AEC and noise reduction into meeting rooms. (Shure on IntelliMix Room AI Denoiser)
Shure also markets ceiling array microphones like the MXA901, which combine automatic coverage with onboard DSP for echo cancellation and noise reduction—an approach aimed squarely at the “hybrid room” problem: everyone on-site sounds like they’re in a tiled aquarium unless you do real acoustic capture. (Shure MXA901 product page)
Why enterprises care: audio is a productivity feature
This is where the “virtual world” framing becomes business-critical. If you’re deploying Teams Rooms across dozens or hundreds of spaces, audio failure scales into operational cost: more IT tickets, more lost meeting time, more employee frustration. That’s why vendors increasingly pitch room kits and centrally managed audio stacks. Shure’s IntelliMix Room Kits for Microsoft Teams Meetings, for example, package DSP and camera components into a modular Windows-based Teams Room setup, explicitly positioning this as an IT simplification story. (Shure IntelliMix Room Kits announcement)
There’s an awkward truth here: the best audio is the audio you never notice. Which makes it hard to budget for—until you’ve lived through the alternative.
Extended reality: sound as a social technology, not just an effect
In XR, audio is not merely about immersion. It’s about social interaction. A 2025 paper in Frontiers in Virtual Reality reviews audio technology for improving social interaction in extended reality, discussing challenges in speech communication and technologies that can improve audio interactions. (Frontiers review on XR audio and social interaction)
That matters because many of the most promising XR use cases aren’t solitary: training, therapy, collaboration, education, performance. In those contexts, audio cues support turn-taking (“is it my turn to speak?”), group awareness (“who is laughing behind me?”), and trust (“does that voice feel present and intelligible?”).
Case study lens: why avatars feel fake when audio is wrong
Here’s a common XR failure mode: an avatar looks okay, the animation is passable, but the voice feels like a radio broadcast. Often the issue isn’t codec quality—it’s the lack of spatial anchoring, room acoustics, and consistent distance cues. The voice doesn’t decay as the avatar moves away, doesn’t get occluded behind objects, and doesn’t reflect the space.
When developers fix those cues, users frequently report that “it suddenly feels real,” even if the graphics didn’t change. That’s the power of auditory plausibility: it can compensate for visual limitations, and it can amplify visual excellence.
Standards are quietly catching up: MPEG-I immersive audio
Immersive audio doesn’t scale without standards. Content creators, device makers, and streaming platforms need interoperable ways to represent audio scenes, metadata, and user interactivity (including 6DoF movement).
One noteworthy development is the ongoing rollout and industry discussion around MPEG-I immersive audio, positioned as a next-generation standard supporting VR/AR use cases, including realistic modeling effects and efficient rendering. (TechRadar overview of MPEG-I immersive audio)
Standards work is rarely sexy, but it’s the difference between “cool demo” and “industry ecosystem.” If XR is going to be more than bespoke apps, audio pipelines must become portable and predictable.
From VR headsets to venues: immersive sound goes physical
Sound in virtual worlds isn’t only about headsets. Immersive audio is showing up in venues that blur the line between physical and digital experiences. Las Vegas’ Sphere, for example, has been widely covered for its advanced audio and multi-sensory approach alongside its massive visual systems. (AVNetwork on Sphere and immersive sound)
And at the consumer entertainment edge, spatial audio is increasingly part of how immersive films and experiences are delivered, including Apple Vision Pro content (where spatial audio is as central as resolution). The point isn’t that every concert becomes VR. It’s that the expectation of “immersive sound” is leaking into mainstream media. (AP on immersive tech in music and film)
The engineering constraints nobody can market away
All of this progress comes with constraints that will define winners and losers in the next few years.
Latency budgets are brutal
Spatial audio that updates with head movement needs low latency. Noise suppression and echo cancellation also add latency. Video encoding adds latency. Network jitter adds latency. You don’t get to add them up forever and still feel “present.”
This is why edge processing, efficient DSP, and hardware acceleration matter. It’s also why some “AI everything” approaches struggle: neural models can be heavy, and real-time audio is less forgiving than batch video generation.
Personalization is a product challenge, not just a research problem
HRTF personalization is a great example. The science is advancing, but the product questions are thorny:
- Do you ask users to scan their ears?
- Can you infer a good-enough HRTF from a selfie?
- Do you provide multiple profiles and let users pick?
- How do you avoid accessibility pitfalls?
And in conferencing, personalization means different things: voice profiles, hearing accommodations, per-user noise suppression settings. The technology exists; the UX to make it sane is still under construction.
Privacy: audio is inherently sensitive
Any system that “cleans up” audio is analyzing audio. If it’s done locally on-device, privacy risks are lower. If it’s done in the cloud, policy and compliance become major factors—especially in enterprise deployments and regulated industries.
Even local processing can raise questions if telemetry is collected to “improve models.” Audio data can contain not just speech but background context (locations, household sounds, other people). So the “power of sound” is also the power to capture and infer—and that requires guardrails.
Where this is heading: fewer gimmicks, more psychoacoustic realism
The near-term future of sound in virtual worlds is less about novelty (“look, it’s 3D!”) and more about reliability, realism, and reduced fatigue. Some emerging directions worth watching:
- Better perceptual testing loops using VR-based evaluation platforms to accelerate algorithm development. (VR-PTOLEMAIC)
- More plausible acoustics with fewer measurements, reducing the capture burden for realistic spaces. (Spatial RIR extrapolation)
- Signal-dependent spatial enhancement that adapts to source motion and user attention, potentially enabling “audio focus” features that feel natural rather than artificial. (Field-of-view enhanced binauralization)
- Context-aware sonic interactions in AR, where virtual objects sound like they belong in the real world rather than triggering a generic “bonk.wav.” (Sonify Anything)
In parallel, enterprise audio will continue to standardize around managed ecosystems: ceiling arrays, onboard DSP, room kits, and centralized monitoring. Not because it’s glamorous, but because the “hybrid room” has become a permanent fixture—and nobody wants to be the person whose board meeting sounded like it was recorded inside a dishwasher.
Practical takeaways: what to do if you build (or buy) virtual audio
If you’re shipping VR/AR apps
- Budget for audio early. Don’t bolt it on after level design.
- Use world-locked spatial audio with head tracking whenever possible.
- Add plausible room cues (early reflections and appropriate reverb), even if simplified.
- Test HRTF choices and offer options; generic isn’t universal.
- Measure latency end-to-end, not per component.
If you’re deploying conferencing and hybrid rooms
- Prioritize microphone strategy (placement and pickup pattern) over “better speakers.”
- Demand real AEC and confirm performance in your actual room conditions.
- Watch for AI artifacts; aggressive denoising can harm intelligibility.
- Centralize management if you have scale—audio issues are operational issues.
Conclusion: the next “metaverse” upgrade is a good microphone and better psychoacoustics
The MIT Technology Review episode title is accurate in a way that’s almost unfair: sound really does have power in a virtual world. It shapes credibility, comprehension, and connection. It makes avatars feel present. It makes AR objects feel physical. It makes hybrid work feel less like shouting into the void.
And because audio is both deeply human and deeply technical, it’s a competitive advantage hiding in plain hearing. The companies and researchers who treat it as a first-class system—rather than a post-processing checkbox—will define what “virtual” feels like in the next decade.
Sources
- Original RSS source / episode listing: Business Lab (MIT Technology Review Insights) on Apple Podcasts (episode: “The power of sound in a virtual world”, dated Jan 26, 2026)
- Original MIT Technology Review link (may block automated access): MIT Technology Review – The power of sound in a virtual world
- Shure MXA901 ceiling array microphone (Automatic Coverage, onboard IntelliMix DSP): Shure product page
- Shure IntelliMix Room AI Denoiser overview: Shure Insights article
- Shure IntelliMix Room Kits for Microsoft Teams Meetings announcement: Shure Newsroom
- Luberadzka et al. (Published Jan 23, 2025): “Audio technology for improving social interaction in extended reality” (Frontiers in Virtual Reality): Frontiers
- Martin & Picinali (arXiv, Oct 10, 2025): “Impact of HRTF individualisation and head movements in a real/virtual localisation task”: arXiv
- Heritage et al. (arXiv, Oct 6, 2025): “Perceptual Evaluation of Extrapolated Spatial Room Impulse Responses From a Mono Source”: arXiv
- Ostan et al. (arXiv, Aug 1, 2025): “VR-PTOLEMAIC: A Virtual Environment for the Perceptual Testing of Spatial Audio Algorithms”: arXiv
- Mittal et al. (arXiv, Sep 16, 2025): “Field of View Enhanced Signal Dependent Binauralization with Mixture of Experts Framework for Continuous Source Motion”: arXiv
- Schütz et al. (arXiv, Aug 3, 2025): “Sonify Anything: Towards Context-Aware Sonic Interactions in AR”: arXiv
- TechRadar Pro: “Unveiling MPEG-I: The next generation of VR and AR audio” (discussion of MPEG-I immersive audio): TechRadar
- AVNetwork: “Eagles transform(.engine) the Vegas Sphere” (immersive venue tech and audio): AVNetwork
- Associated Press: “Immersive tech reshapes music and film landscape…” (spatial audio in immersive entertainment): AP News
Bas Dorland, Technology Journalist & Founder of dorland.org