Re: [Sursound] an exploratory mail
On 23/01/2013 01:39, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. Why are you actually not reading what I was posting? One of the requirements is arbitrary speaker layouts. Full stop. (There will be some fixed layouts, I guess. But still.) ... of multi-channel audio programs and the ability to flexibly render an audio program to an arbitrary number of loudspeakers with arbitrary configurations. Possibly people were working on the basis of your initial comment: However, my impression is that the MPEG's intention is more to settle on something relatively simple, like 22.2, Auro-3D speaker layout etc. Which would narrow the range of layouts considerably. I can well understand the attraction that dealing with specific companies would have for the MPEG committees. They have clearly identified and authoritative individuals to deal with who represent the company - whether a CTO or a CEO. Who will stand up to be the CTO or CEO of Ambisonics, with the support of the community? It would ostensibly need to be someone (or a small group) not encumbered by possible conflicts of interests with commercial organisations they work for. But also someone who can discuss and accommodate the special needs of cinema while making the broader argument too. So they would still need one way or another to speak with the authentic voice of the industry. Ambisonics may in all sorts of ways be both the superior and the most appropriate technology, but even now it has barely escaped the laboratory and the concert hall. We can be sure Auro-3D etc will be lobbying intensively, not least on the strength of existing industry adoption (e.g. Auro-3D's list of cinemas using their system). So ambisonics has quite a bit of ground to make up, in effect not only to make its case, but also to make the case against the existing and already more established choices. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] A proposal for an Ambisonics based 3D audio codec, MPEG/ITU style...
On 23 Jan 2013, at 02:53, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: P.S.: FLAC was the first widely used codec for lossless compression, so here the commercial competition has a problem. How so? FLAC has a different design objective than some of the commercial lossless codecs. FLAC was intended mostly for rippers, i.e. people who want to encode a lot of CDs, and store them and play them back on computers, so a big emphasis was encoding speed. Other algorithms are designed for max. compression and are thus slower and use more CPU but use less space. Others are optimized for minimal CPU use during decompression, such as to be workable on low power CPUs in portable devices. FLAC is but a choice, and not always the best one, from a technical point of view, even though it's free. -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4853 bytes Desc: not available URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20130123/9780edb4/attachment.bin ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] Symposium on Electronic and Computer Music, EMSAR 2013, Cambridge UK [CALL FOR PAPERS]
Dear All, and with apologies for cross-posting, please forward to anyone who may be interested. Regards, Tom. /// One Day Symposium on Electronic and Computer Music, EMSAR 2013 Including an evening concert celebrating the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Dr Peter Zinovieff **Saturday 11 May 2013** Department of Music and Performing Arts, Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE), and the Digital Performing Laboratory, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom** Confirmed invited speakers include: Prof Monty Adkins (University of Huddersfield), Dr Till Bovermann (Media Lab Helsinki), Prof Simon Emmerson (De Montfort University), Dr Mick Grierson (Goldsmiths), Prof Peter Manning (Durham University), Dr James Mooney (University of Leeds) and Dr Peter Zinovieff. Electronic and computer music relies on the materiality of its associated hardware and equipment variously for its realisation, transmission, storage and restoration. Archives of contemporary music, for example, tend still to focus on traditional musical manuscripts over the increasing number of other forms of possible musical representations. Musicologists, composers and technologists working in the fields of electronic and computer music arguably are faced with a much more complex situation regarding the archiving and representation of this music compared to those dealing solely with musical manuscripts. This one day symposium will focus on these issues and related issues from a variety of perspectives, especially related to the material traces of this music: scores, and other objects and physical representations of storage and transmission, hardware---real or virtual. In doing so, we examine the possible futures of electronic and computer music of the past and present from the perspectives of musicologist, archivist, music technologist, composer and performer. The symposium concludes with an evening concert celebrating the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Dr Peter Zinovieff, co-founder in the late 1960s of Electronic Music Studios, London, and collaborator with such composers as Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werne Henze. Now enjoying a blossoming of compositional activity, this concert will include examples of Zinovieff's early work, as well as his most recent work in computer music. CALL FOR PAPERS Papers are welcome around, but not limited to, the following themes: * The materiality of early electronic, tape and computer music * Restoration and archiving of music involving technology * Modes of representation of electronic and computer music (objects, scores, code…) * Constraints, affordances and the idiomatic in electronic, tape and computer music * The DIY aesthetic in electronic music hardware of the 20th century * Hardware and virtual hardware for electronic music (re)creation * Collaborations between composers and music technologists in the 20th Century * Electronic Music Studios (EMS) hardware for 21st Century electronic music performance * Spatialisation techniques in early tape, electronic and computer music * Music technology hardware as a bridge between modernist and popular music Proposals for 20 minute papers in English should be submitted in the form of an abstract of maximum 300 words. Proposals for panel sessions of 60 minutes with up to four participants may also be submitted in the form of individual abstracts, or an extended panel abstract of maximum 750 words. All proposals should include, for each participant: * Full title of proposed paper (or panel session) * Title, name and institutional affiliation (as relevant) * Email and postal address and telephone number * Short biography (maximum 250 words) * Short list of recent publications, conference papers or other events as relevant * A full list of audiovisual and other requirements (e.g. data projector, CD/DVD player, 2 or 4-channel audio, piano, EMS Synthi VCS3) Proposals should be sent as a combined _single_ email attachment to: Address: mu...@anglia.ac.uk Subject line: EMSAR 2013 Plain text is preferred for abstracts (html, md, txt), but rtf, doc, and docx are also acceptable. The deadline for receipt of proposals is **Monday 25 Febraury 2013**. Notification of acceptance will be sent to applicants by the end of March at the latest. Please contact Dr Tom Hall for more information or to be notified when further registration details are available on the conference website: Email: mu...@anglia.ac.uk Subject line: EMSAR 2013 Conference Website: http//:www.anglia.ac.uk/emsar Anglia Ruskin University Department of Music and Performing Arts, Anglia Ruskin University East Road Cambridge CB1 1PT UK www.anglia.ac.uk/mpa www.anglia.ac.uk/code www.anglia.ac.uk/dpl Dr Tom Hall Senior Lecturer, Creative Music Technology Helmore 244
Re: [Sursound] A proposal for an Ambisonics based 3D audio codec, MPEG/ITU style...
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 03:21:46PM +0100, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: How so? FLAC has a different design objective than some of the commercial lossless codecs. FLAC was intended mostly for rippers, i.e. people who want to encode a lot of CDs, and store them and play them back on computers, so a big emphasis was encoding speed. Other algorithms are designed for max. compression and are thus slower and use more CPU but use less space. Others are optimized for minimal CPU use during decompression, such as to be workable on low power CPUs in portable devices. Quoted from the FLAC documentation: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware. There is absolutely nothing in the documentation that suggests that FLAC was designed for rippers. OTOH it was designed to be streamable, which suggest another type of use. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] an exploratory mail
Richard Dobson wrote: On 23/01/2013 01:39, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. Why are you actually not reading what I was posting? One of the requirements is arbitrary speaker layouts. Full stop. (There will be some fixed layouts, I guess. But still.) ... of multi-channel audio programs and the ability to flexibly render an audio program to an arbitrary number of loudspeakers with arbitrary configurations. Possibly people were working on the basis of your initial comment: However, my impression is that the MPEG's intention is more to settle on something relatively simple, like 22.2, Auro-3D speaker layout etc. Which would narrow the range of layouts considerably. I can well understand the attraction that dealing with specific companies would have for the MPEG committees. They have clearly identified and authoritative individuals to deal with who represent the company - whether a CTO or a CEO. Who will stand up to be the CTO or CEO of Ambisonics, with the support of the community? It would ostensibly need to be someone (or a small group) not encumbered by possible conflicts of interests with commercial organisations they work for. But also someone who can discuss and accommodate the special needs of cinema while making the broader argument too. So they would still need one way or another to speak with the authentic voice of the industry. Ambisonics may in all sorts of ways be both the superior and the most appropriate technology, but even now it has barely escaped the laboratory and the concert hall. We can be sure Auro-3D etc will be lobbying intensively, not least on the strength of existing industry adoption (e.g. Auro-3D's list of cinemas using their system). So ambisonics has quite a bit of ground to make up, in effect not only to make its case, but also to make the case against the existing and already more established choices. Richard Dobson I would suggest that the fast track Ambisonics based proposal which I have made - relying on already defined elements, or elements which could be defined and implemented in an easy and fast way, like a modified B+ scheme with higher order and more direct channels - is way superiour to Auro-3D, even if using only 3rd order. In fact, the 3D performance of any reasonable .AMB/HOA based approach (referring to the potential vertical resolution of 2nd+ order height elements) seems to beat any proposed commercial 3D audio solution for cinemas which I have seen recently. (Let us also consider that the 3D performance of classical WFS doesn't seem to be that good, too. :-) ) Therefore, Ambisonics fits best into the official requirements of the MPEG's CfP: It is a very natural approach for 3D audio, and arbitrary speaker layouts are no problem. If I am right (and it seems like...), it would be a no-brainer to chose some Ambisonics based solution as the fexible part of the new MPEG-H part 3 standard. (Of course they still might want to define 11.1 or 22.2 as typical fixed solutions. If we speak about solutions for 3D audio, I would not expect that you can install dozens of speakers everywhere. However, you should keep the chance to implement some excellent solutions for concert halls/big cinemas etc. But you would have to cover smaller/cheaper installations, home installations, mobile audio via headphones...) In spite of a former commentary of Dave Malham I would expect that it would be very difficult to agree on any standard for audio objects, as there isn't any common approach available. (They would have to chose some clearly propietary solution, and this doesn't look like a reasonable standard definition.) Therefore, Ambisonics seems to win again. In spite of different opinions on some issues, the technique is based on a mathematical theory, and there is a considerable implementation tradition. If anything, there is far more experience available to implement sound field based solutions than to implement to completely new object based solutions. In this sense, I think we don't have to be too shy. Ambisonics is used in many installations. In fact, Dolby Atmos and (DTS) Headphone:X or MDA are the newcomers Ambisonics is used for open air concerts. FLAC made it without CEOs or CTO's, so what? (It got a typical de-facto standard for lossless audio compression, without any company support.) But also someone who can discuss and accommodate the special needs of cinema while making the broader argument too. So they would still need one way or another to speak with the authentic voice of the industry. Yes. Audio for 3D movies was the initial motivation, and they are certainly interested in 3D audio for UHD TV... I gave some feedback to think about a flexible and broad solution for everything. They should present a 3D audio codec in the wide sense, because this is what they really seem to need. If the required and to be defined 3D audio codec is strong enough for cinema use and
