You will reportedly be able to move the annoying voices in your Discord calls far away with an upcoming spatial audio feature
Overview & Key Takeaways
Sorry, can't hear you over there.
I've never been the prime target market for much of Discord, given I don't make use of big groups and multi-channel servers. For me, it's just a tool to chat to select friends, which is why most Discord updates go in one ear and out the other. But not this one, because it looks like the voice chat platform might be getting a big new change to its core feature: voice chat.
According to Pirat_Nation and DiscordPreviews on X, the Canary (experimental) version of Discord has some hidden gubbins pertaining to spatial audio, and it looks like some keen eyes have even dug it up and got it running.
It looks like the way they've got it working is by using BetterDiscord which allows you to enable DevTools in a panel on the right. I downloaded this and got it running on Discord Canary but couldn't get the panel up, as a Chrome wrapper Inspect panel popped up instead. So I'll have to go off these other users' reports for now.
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It looks like the feature, presumably being tested for an upcoming release in the bona fide Discord app, lets you position users you're in a call with around you at different angles and distances. Discord then makes it sound like they're at this position and distance from you when they speak.
The idea is, I think, to make it easier to distinguish between different people talking and make things sound a little more natural if you're in a big call. It'll be new to Discord but not in general because some other voice chat services like TeamSpeak already have a similar feature.
It looks like you'll also be able to change the 'room size' and 'spatial blend', where the latter presumably means how much of your incoming voice audio will follow a spatial layout and how much will just play as normal, mixing the two.
It will certainly be fun to try when it makes its way into the proper app, especially now that Discord has finally added end-to-end encryption to its voice and video calls. All positive changes, but—to end on a paradigmatically sour note—I just can't help but wonder how much of these recent developments stems from the backlash against its age verification measures that surfaced earlier in the year. Still, people can have a short memory; perhaps that will be the case here.
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