Inside the First Dolby Atmos Album Made for Indigenous Language Preservation

The Album That Let Future Generations Step Inside the Drum Circle

Some projects find you because they're supposed to.

Nova Spatial works closely with many of Canada's top indigenous artists, including long-time collaborators the Snotty Nose Rez Kids, with whom we took home the 2025 Juno Award for Rap Album of the Year. It's a community we're deeply embedded in, which is how YB Nakota found us. He was finishing his debut album and looking for an engineer who understood the space. The Snotty Nose guys sent him our way.

Nakota is from Treaty Six territory, Paul's First Nation in Alberta. His grandmother survived residential school, and he has spent years on a path of healing and reconnecting with his culture, sharing that journey through music and with at-risk youth across the country. He travels to communities in Canada and the US carrying traditional Nakota songs, and the weight those performances carry tells you immediately this music is doing something beyond entertainment.

When he brought us the album, the recordings were simple but powerful: a single drum track and a single vocal. Honest and direct, the way ceremony tends to be. I had been doing a lot of work in spatial audio and Dolby Atmos that year, and it struck me immediately what a compelling experience indigenous ceremony could be in an immersive format. I did some quick research and confirmed it had never been done before. We talked it through, and it became clear pretty quickly that we had a real opportunity in front of us, to be at the forefront of something that sat right at the intersection of culture, preservation and technology.

What Dolby Atmos Does That Stereo Can't

Most recorded music is built on a single axis. Sounds can only be positioned left, right, or somewhere in the middle, and that's the full spatial range stereo has to offer. Dolby Atmos opens up two additional axes, adding height and depth so that sounds can exist above you, behind you, at any point in a fully three-dimensional space. For indigenous ceremony and drumming, that opens up possibilities stereo simply cannot touch.

When Nakota and I started discussing his album, we realized we were dealing with something beyond a music project. These are traditional songs that carry language, ceremony and cultural knowledge passed down across generations, tied to a way of life that faces very real pressures. When you think about recordings like these as a living archive, the question of format becomes a lot more important. How do you preserve something in a way that does it justice for the people who will be listening a hundred years from now?

That's where it all clicked. Spatial audio captures a full three-dimensional sphere of sound, storing every position, distance and dimension as data that can be rendered across any format, from headphones to cinema to virtual reality, and across any format yet to come. A stereo recording of a drum circle gives future generations something to listen to. A Dolby Atmos recording gives them something to step inside, to feel surrounding them the way it would in real life. We committed to building out the full spatial mix and never looked back.

Recording the Drum Circle in Dolby Atmos

Once Nakota and I aligned on the vision, the sessions took on a different energy. We went back in and recorded additional drum and vocal takes, building out a full drum circle with sound arriving from behind the listener, from above, from every point in the room. The goal was the physical sensation of being inside the music rather than in front of it.

We wove in Atmos field recordings of wind, rain and thunder. A recording studio can feel sterile and overly controlled, and we wanted these recordings to exist in a real, organic environment and atmosphere. The field recordings gave the ceremony a natural world to breathe in. Special spatial reverbs and Atmos-specific processing gave the drums and vocals the kind of depth and dimensionality you feel in your chest on a proper playback system.

Nakota described the moment it clicked: "When Jamie brought up building it into a full Dolby Atmos experience, I started seeing it differently. Not just as music, but as a space you can step into. Everything we added felt like we were truly situating the ceremony in a living, traditional environment. This wasn't just a track anymore. It was something immersive. Something cultural. Something that could carry our people's energy in a new way."

Nakota Tayhunyabi is available now on Apple Music in spatial audio. For the full Dolby Atmos experience, listen on AirPods or any Atmos-enabled headphones.

His Grandmother's Voice

Partway through production, an idea surfaced that became the most important part of the project.

Nakota's grandmother speaks an endangered indigenous language, one at real risk of disappearing within a generation. I suggested she narrate between the songs, to provide context for the album and create an audio document of her language that future generations might otherwise never hear spoken. Nakota was immediately receptive and moved quickly to make it happen. She recorded at home on her own territory and sent us the files, which we cleaned up and placed within the sonic world we'd built around the songs.

She had never experienced anything like it. As Nakota put it: "She was blown away. She had never witnessed anything like this in her life, to hear her voice in an album this beautiful. We preserved her language, her dialect, for generations to come."

What none of us fully anticipated was how moving it would be in practice. Hearing her voice woven through those immersive soundscapes, threading between the drums and wind and the spatial reverb we had built, was one of those moments in the studio where you put down what you're doing and just listen. Nakota said it simply: "I thought about my grandkids listening to their grandpa sing and their great-great-grandma speak in our language. For years to come this will always be here. They will always hear the dialects of our people. We preserved it."

The Juno Nomination

When the nomination came through for Traditional Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year at the 2026 Juno Awards, we were thrilled. This was Nakota's first album, and to see his ceremony and songs recognized at the highest level in Canadian music meant a great deal to everyone involved. We were also proud to be at the forefront of using this technology for cultural and language preservation work that we think deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

Nakota performed at the Indigenous honoring ceremony at the Junos in Hamilton. The album had done what it set out to do.

What Comes Next

Nakota Tayhunyabi quietly did something that hasn't been done before: it proved that immersive audio and indigenous language preservation belong together, and that the format can carry the full weight of ceremony in a way nothing else can. That case has now been made, recognized at the Junos, and the conversations it has opened with indigenous programs and leaders across Canada are ones we intend to follow through on.

Nova Spatial will have more to share soon about those partnerships. In the meantime, if you are working on a cultural or language preservation project and want to talk about what spatial audio could do for it, we would genuinely love to hear from you.

Nakota put it best: "Think about your grandkids. Generations from now, they want to know how did our people speak? What was our dialect? This should be spread across communities, because it's more than music. It's about keeping who we are."

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Jamie Kuse is the co-founder of Nova Spatial, a Canadian Dolby Atmos mixing and spatial audio studio specializing in immersive audio for music, culture and preservation projects. Nova Spatial works closely with leading Canadian indigenous artists including the Snotty Nose Rez Kids.## The Album That Let Future Generations Step Inside the Drum Circle