Particle systems are a new sound design approach that is receiving some attention from the cinema community due to the ability to handle thousands of sound sources simultaneously. Unfortunately, current immersive object-based audio formats are not prepared for such scale, forcing sound designers to use traditional channel-based audio approaches. This paper presents a hybrid approach that tries to merge the advantages of both object-based audio and channel-based audio. By using audio-objects with static positions, a high number of virtual "speaker channels" can be created, adding more space resolution than traditional channel-based formats, and allowing the mix of thousands of sounds. The proposed method can be used not only with particle systems software, but also on object-based audio down-mixing processes or even in high-demanding audio post-production workflows.
Fonseca et al. (Thu,) studied this question.