Re: [Sursound] format convention of Ambisonic Sound Library Files
Welcome to my world - as it used to be! The ring-pass-not is that word 'standardised". My AMB Wavex-based file format is now 22 years old (FuMa, up to third-order). People have long moved on - basically as soon as that was published, everyone here started arguing about all the other information that should be included, alternative standards, channel order, higher orders, filters, irregular layouts, the works. I am still not too sure if even now things are standardised enough for anyone to write a fresh file format for it that pleases everyone. Suffice it to say, such things can't just be written,they have to be implemented and tested, e.g. on vast tiered speaker layouts which very few people have access to. And of course it will need to use a 64bit-friendly file format too... A reminder, for anyone feeling nostalgic: http://www.rwdobson.com/bformat.html Richard Dobson On 24/05/2022 23:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2022-05-24, Alan Kan wrote: Ah… it seems one has to actually click on the file to see that detail. I was downloading from the list page. Why not embed the a standardised format descriptor into the file itself? Most formats permit that. In fact that's what we've been doing all along e.g.in RIFF WAVE. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Funding opportunity for small business
Sounds like you need a web-based clone of Sonic Visualiser (https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/). I see the grant is limited to USA small businesses. Richard Dobson On 28/10/2020 00:47, Anne Simonis wrote: Hi All, I'm an acoustic ecologist with NOAA, and my research uses underwater acoustic recordings to study marine mammal ecology, behavior, and the impacts of human noise. NOAA recently announced a small business grant opportunity, with a subtopic related to citizen science and education (subtopic 9.5 in the full announcement): https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=329444 ... ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] FOA/HOA Impulse Responses
For fun, you can try the "Darkside" responses recorded a few years ago by illustrious members of this list: http://www.rwdobson.com/sspaces/sciencespaces.html Richard Dobson On 09/10/2019 17:24, Mads Kjeldgaard wrote: Hello everyone I was wondering if there were some freely available impulse response recordings online in FOA or HOA format that could be used for ambisonic convolution reverb experiments, before I head out and record my own? Best regards ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Deconstructing soundbar marketing B.S.
On 28/05/2019 08:49, Augustine Leudar wrote: wow : .. It would be great if someone could just invent bluetooth quad (or more) then you could happily just deposit four cable free bluetooth speakers around the room and be done with all this nonsense. ... Slightly a propos to this: in his 2000 "Millennium" article in JAES, Andy Moorer proposed "In 20 years, loudspeakers and microphones will know where they are". How are we doing with that, with one year to go? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Simple Software to Play a 6-channel WAV File
Perhaps the "simplest" possible player is a command line one? My "paplay" program plays (and loops) multichannel files to a nominated device, and while it does not have interactive facilities it offers full channel mapping and selecting. Plus elementary B-Format decoding. Part of the old mctoolkit, now resident here: http://www.rwdobson.com/mctools.html and also included in of the even older CDP system :-). I am toying with doing a GUI counterpart, but not for a little while yet. Richard Dobson On 25/10/2017 23:14, len moskowitz wrote: I wrote: I'd appreciate it if someone could recommend a very simple Windows audio player that can play a 6-channel WAV file to a 6-speaker ring. So far, the best solution is Wavosaur (https://www.wavosaur.com). The price is right: free, but donations are appreciated. I sent them 20 Euro. It's a very light DAW program - just a single executable file - and doesn't need to be installed. I copied it onto the Windows 10 PC, ran it, opened the 6-channel WAV file, set the audio card to ASIO (MME didn't work right), easily routed the 6 channels to the correct speakers for the hexagon speaker ring, and hit the space bar to play the file. It was that simple. It has one other nice feature that's useful for troubleshooting: you can mute any of the channels while it's playing by typing the number of the channel. Typing it again enables the channel again. I'd like to have found an even simpler program, but this is likely as simple as it will get. Len Moskowitz (mosko...@core-sound.com) Core Sound LLC www.core-sound.com Home of TetraMic and OctoMic ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] OT: Opportunities for Study and Funding at the University of Birmingham / BEAST
I totally agree; and found much the same on many of the recent Bond films. 'Tomorrow Never Dies' was especially overladen and noisy; perhaps they felt they had to cover up the more than usually silly plot. But I do have to acknowledge that the sound system in our local Frome cinema is probably not the best available. Film spatialisation seems far too often to involve routing this sound to that speaker. And it seems almost mandatory that all dialogue is on the Centre speaker. Yet there are commercial Ambisonic sound libraries, so where are the state of the art films which use them? FWIW, there is a "sound design" group on Yahoo Groups (does come through as simple email), which is focussed on film sound. It's not a busy group, a trickle of messages from time to time. Currently there is a thread on foley, and how to record very quiet things. A few posts announcing sound libraries n'stuff. I have no idea if anyone is on there who is a film sound "A-list" person. Richard Dobson On 21/11/2015 08:09, Michael Chapman wrote: ... Think I may have already told this one: Quite some years ago I had insisted that the children watch videos in the original language _and_ without subtitles. I caught them with the subtitles on. They responded that the subtitles were in the same language as the soundtrack, and they had them on because they couldn't hear the dialogue. I listened for a bit ... and apologised. Presumably there are special plug-ins that destroy sondtracks. It would be fascinating if someone would (anonymously, I presume) come 'out' and share the dirt ... ... ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] OT: Opportunities for Study and Funding at the University of Birmingham / BEAST
And yet another reason - with dialogue in glorious mono on one channel, dubbing for other languages is super-easy. Richard Dobson On 21/11/2015 10:52, Eero Aro wrote: .. Ever since, 99% of all dialogue has been placed in the center channel for the reasons Dave is describing. There are even more reasons. The timbre of the voice is different, if it moves away from the center channel. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Google Files Trademark for ‘360-Degree Spherical Audio’ Software
It doesn't sound quite the most robust title, really - either tautologous or self-contradictory? Richard Dobson On 09/09/2015 18:01, mgra...@mstvp.com wrote: From yesterday's tech news headlines: Google Files Trademark for '360-Degree Spherical Audio' Software http://www.omgchrome.com/google-dynamic-virtual-surround-sound-trademark Sadly, no technical details offered. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
[Sursound] another tasty lookingmulti-channel dsp kit
Hello all, AD have a new dual-core SHARC-based evaluation board (long URL): http://www.analog.com/en/design-center/evaluation-hardware-and-software/evaluation-boards-kits/EVAL-ADSP-SC589.html Offers two i/o modes, 4 in + 8 out, or 12 out; plus Ethernet, USB 2, etc. Some obvious applications come to mind... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] another tasty lookingmulti-channel dsp kit
On 17/06/2015 10:12, Michael Chapman wrote: Hello all, AD have a new dual-core SHARC-based evaluation board (long URL): http://www.analog.com/en/design-center/evaluation-hardware-and-software/evaluation-boards-kits/EVAL-ADSP-SC589.html Looks interesting ... The webpage won't give me a price (some browser problem ...), about how much ? There are two EZKIT versions, shown as $435 and $495: http://www.analog.com/en/design-center/evaluation-hardware-and-software/evaluation-boards-kits/EVAL-ADSP-SC589.html#eb-buy The latter has ICE stuff and extended software licence for something, probably not needed in most cases. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Splitting a 10.2 file
Unfortunately it not quite as easy as it should be, as companies such as Steinberg and Digidesign extend (i.e. abuse) the documented WAVE format with such things as over-large format chunks; I have had to modify my strictly compliant code more than once to accommodate such technically non-compliant files. This why people writing soundfile code for critical production work really do need to use libsndfile, as the author has refined it over very many years (and of course it is used everywhere so tested to destruction, so to speak) to catch all such idiosyncracies. I have limited myself to WAVE and AIFF PCM (and of course AMB). The channelx (CDP multi-channel toolkit, now open source so also available for Linux) command line is really very simple, as it is almost automatic, e.g. to split a 6-chan file hex.wav to files called hex_c*.wav: channelx -ohexsplit.wav hex.wav 1 2 3 4 5 6 gives files called hexsplit_c1.wav ... hexsplit_c6.wav (the -o flag option allows you to specify a custom base outfile name to which the '_cN' suffix will be added as needed). see: http://people.bath.ac.uk/masrwd/mctools.html Last updated March 2014 Richard Dobson On 04/09/2014 01:48, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2014-09-03, Martin Leese wrote: It's a command line program. Very fast. Needs lotsa careful typing. Or sloppy typing into a text editor to create a BAT file. Then execute the BAT file. And, by the way, if you need some de novo code to do something like that, it ain't gonna be too expensive in the first place. IFF/AIFF/RIFF/QTFF/BMFF and their ilk are downright ridiculously easy to decode and sieve. Let's say, it only takes a day's worth of effort to extract what you want from them, so that you could easily offer $80/h before taxes for the effort. Encoding into the various forms, that's another ballgame. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] And now for something different...
I think the AES already has a project to define a file format for htrfs; when I get home I can find the project code. Richard Dobson Sent from my iPhone On 23 Jun 2014, at 17:43, Martin Leese martin.le...@stanfordalumni.org wrote: Bo-Erik Sandholm wrote: Is there a way to get a personalized HRTF (or even one near mine) with out spending many hundreds of the coins of your choice or travelling to a distant destination? No but, if the Microsoft stuff works out, there might be. Is there a standard format for HRTFS that can be used in several softwares or even converted? The answer is, again, no. However, to state the obvious, if HRTFs are going to fly then there needs to be. Is this a task for the AES and/or the EBU? To continue stating the obvious, most audio-only listening currently takes place using ear-buds plugged into players or phones. This doesn't look like it is going to change anytime soon. Binaural with personalized HRTFs would improve this listening experience. Regards, Martin -- Martin J Leese E-mail: martin.leese stanfordalumni.org Web: http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
Re: [Sursound] Inexpensive USB multichannel sound card
There is an even cheaper one (£23.70, Amazon): http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003IMG3L2 Looks like a clone of ST-Lab (etc). Looks all the ones with 4 buttons on top are based in the same hardware. I will likely take a chance on it as I also could also use a cheap USB m/c card, and that is just about an impulse-purchase price point. If it works on the R-Pi (all 8 channels!) that will make it extra interesting. Richard Dobson On 30/03/2014 02:25, Marc Lavallée wrote: Augustine Leudar gustar...@gmail.com a écrit : anyone know of a UK/Ireland supplier of the Sabrant USB-SND8 ? Ebay? Also look for the ST-Lab USB Sound Box; it is similar, if not identical. -- Marc ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] AMB support in Audition CC
I have had a nice email from a couple of Adobe developers to mention that they added support for AMB files in Audition CC. Specifically: Here's basically what we support * Ambisonic B Format (W,X,Y,Z) in WAVE and WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE files per the guidelines on your website. Both import and export. Including the .amb file extension * Import and Export of the same through libsndfile (we include that as one of the options now) * Import and Export of the same through AIFF/AIFF-C through the undocumented CHAN chunk (same as what is in CAF files) * When on Mac, Import and Export of the same through Apple's AudioToolbox API and the formats that support it (e.g. CAF files). A screendump they sent shows that the WXYZ channel idents are displayed for each channel in the main waveform editor display. They also provide a couple of presets in the channel mixer, for decoding to quad and ITU 5.1 (remains to be seen how well that one works), and a further one to convert from A format to B format, which may be of interest to microphone users here. They told me that despite the stated tech requirements of OS X 10.7 onwards I will be able to install it on my 10.6 Mac; only the video codec components won't load, which for me is no loss at all. So I should be able to get at least the trial version running. It goes without saying that this does not make Audition a super-duper HOA workstation, and of course it is far from being free software, but it does hopefully bring basic B-Format processing to a(n even) wider public. They were kind enough to thank me for my AMB web page, which they said made adding the support rather easy :-). Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] BBC Radio Three Surround Streaming Trial (15. to 31. March)
On 16/03/2014 20:36, Marc Lavallée wrote: Augustine Leudar augustineleu...@gmail.com a écrit : There not streaming at the moment so I cant test it - I would guess that either the browser automatically routes the 4 channels to 1,2,3,4 on the soundcard or there is some way of telling it which outputs to route the 4 channels to. I have an RME too , As long as the RME is set as the default soundcard should be fine. Augustine, you can test it here: http://rdmedia.bbc.co.uk/radio3/faq.html On my Ubuntu laptop, Chromium is using Pulseaudio with a jackd sink, configured for 7.1. For some reason, the rear-left and rear-front channels also output the front-left and front-right channels. It's almost working... -- Marc On my Windows XP machine with M-Audio Firewire 410 (m/c interleaved device), it all works as (I think) intended; five output channel idents are provided on the test page (quad + centre), so in terms of quasi 5.1 the rear channels are swapped (left out of ch 4, right out of ch 5). Setting the speaker layout via Control Panel seems not to make any difference, so I have to assume they are sending a generic 5-channel stream, not a specific WAVE_EX layout. So all that should be required to hear it correctly is a multi-channel interleaved device. I have heard (but need confirmation) that at least some RME cards only offer multiple stereo devices - ? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] 4 D sound (!)
On 08/03/2014 22:35, Sampo Syreeni wrote: There are four basic forms of the theory used in signal processing, which are all connected but also subtly different. The Fourier transform is continuous time and continuous frequency. The Fourier series is periodic time and discrete frequency. The discrete time Fourier transform is discrete time and periodic frequency. And finally the discrete Fourier transform is both discrete and periodic in both frequency and in time. It took me *ages* to get that shit right, and all that goes on between them. I was pretty happy then. Then along came you guys, with your spherical surface harmonics and Fourier-Bessel decompositions. Even the cylindrical variety. A math friend of mine pointed out number theoretical transforms and how this all ties in with locally compact Abelian groups. Abstract harmonical analysis. Then even my engineer pals suddenly went crazy with discrete cosine transforms, MDCT, modulated and lapped transforms, time-frequency decompositions, general partitions of unity, overcomplete bases, L^1 norms, projection pursuits... An observation - none of this stuff will actually be cool until it figures in a script for The Big Bang Theory... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Questions about support of .amb file (Wave based)
It's not a proprietary extension, any more than is doc, txt or cpp. It is simply strongly recommended as standard. It is a common misconception that a file extension somehow defines a file format. It does not, and more importantly should not, if the format itself has been properly designed to be self-describing (this applies particularly to binary file formats of course). The file extension is a resource to facilitate exchange, organisation, wild-card selection and filtering, whether by software or by the user. So much easier to block move or copy files if you can select based on the extension - amb to this folder, wav to that folder, and aiff way over there out of harms way. The other major purpose of a file extension is for OS-supported file associations - double-clicking on a .wav file will open this application, while double-clicking on a .amb file will open some other application; both of which you have set up as you want. So, yes, the application will read the header and discover a file is AMB (or WAVE, or AIFC) - but how will ~you~ discover its format reliably just by looking at the extension? If you find a .wav file somewhere on the net, what do expect it to contain? Otherwise, you may as well label all soundfiles as .wav (or .tom and .jerry) , even if they are internally AIFC. It happens! Richard Dobson On 02/10/2013 11:29, Sebastian Gabler wrote: I guess it has been discussed here before, but why again is a proprietary extension proposed? See The use of a custom GUID ensures that AMB files will not (and should not) be recognised as a soundfile by applications unaware of the format. Shouldn't that suffice, also for files that have the standard extension .wav? (http://dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/researchdev/wave-ex/bformat.html) Or the other way around: should an application work with the custom WAVE_EX structure only when the file has the extension .amb? ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Questions about support of .amb file (Wave based)
Sort of: the purpose of ambisonic encoding is to enable any given stream or file to be decoded into different speaker arrays; the purpose of the AMB format is to provide a standardised container (complete with file extension :-)) for B-Format streams (using FuMa encoding), and to disambiguate those files from other multi-channel PCM soundfiles. AMB supports up to full 3rd order (16 channels). Richard Dobson On 02/10/2013 14:36, Augustine Leudar wrote: Just to clarify - is the purpose of the .amb format so you can play the same .amb file ambisonically on different speaker arrays/numbers of speakers - it 1st order/ 2nd orger/ 3rd order etc ? ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Questions about support of .amb file (Wave based)
It is really rather standard in computer music circles; we could call it a well-established convention, to associate a particular extension with a particular file format. There is a wide range of soundfile formats out there, many of which predate WAVE (.au, .snd, etc); to say nothing of the gallimaufry of compressed formats. The huge list of formats supported by libsndfile gives a pretty good idea. The plain WAVE format is universally recognised as representing channels which correspond either implicitly or explicitly to speaker feeds. That is not true of the AMB format, so that in that technical sense giving an AMB file the .wav extension misrepresents it. There are examples out there of creative, strategic or proprietary naming. For example, Apple's Logic Pro supplies a generous number of reverb impulses in files with the extension SDIR (for use with the Sound Designer convolution reverb). You will find they are in fact almost all (I haven't examined them all) plain and playable AIFC files (mono or stereo), albeit with some extra proprietary chunks. So people might well be minded to change the names. But double-clicking on an SDIR file launches the Impulse Response Utility, which is really quite handy! Richard Dobson On 02/10/2013 13:15, Sebastian Gabler wrote: I am aware of these rather formal aspects. With the criteria of a self-describing format fulfilled, it comes down to a naming convention. Why that is part of a format specification is unclear to me. Moreover it may cause what is actually a misconception according to the below standing criteria that opening the container according to the .amb extension is a requirement. It should be rather an option (to those who would like to have a proprietary extension), and the requirement is to handle the stream correctly within a file with a standard .wav extension. Unless there are practical aspects, like the custom GUID would crash most of the amb-agnostic players, which I doubt. Even then, the motive should be given in the specification. Sheep should be called sheep. All IMO. Sebastian Gabler ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Questions about support of .amb file (Wave based)
It is still better to associate verbs such as allow with the player, rather than with the file. Software allows you do do stuff, files just are what they are. The specialists here may argue about any number of speakers. Classical Ambisonic decoding requires specific kinds of regular layouts (square, hex, octagon, cube, e.g. as listed on my web page and elsewhere), with stereo probably as a default on first launch. There are recipes for other standard layouts such as 5.1. With HOA, I could not even begin to enumerate the options. Chances are in most situations that the user will have some particular layout set up, and will hope to decode most files to it, most of the time. The very high-end decoders (Fons?) do offer the means to specify the positions of each speaker and then compute the decoding magic accordingly (and always awaiting the day predicted by James Moorer when speakers will know where they are). The challenge Ambisonics presents to a DAW is that in most cases the number of B-Format channels and the number of speakers decoded to are not the same; this is a somewhat exotic paradigm for a conventional DAW that has been carefully built around just speaker feeds. But once such a facility has been implemented in the host, in principle a high-end decoder plugin could be installed to do it more suavely. Apart from the basics of loading an AMB file into Nuendo, playing it (hopefully through some installed modest decoder) and writing it, the other obvious task is mixing - possibly with the stipulation that all the files are of the same order (number of channels). So one wxyz file can be mixed in the usual way with another wxyz file. The data remains in amb format and would not need to be re-encoded for export. Perchance a built-in decoder can decode for real-time playback in some nominal way (maybe even for headphones) for simple monitoring purposes. I would not expect Steinberg to add anything more sophisticated than that (nice as that would be). In fact, I suspect I would be happy just to know that Nuendo could read an amb file into generic channels, and export likewise, leaving it to users to do what they will, good bad or otherwise, with the data. Richard Dobson On 02/10/2013 19:03, Augustine Leudar wrote: So basically the .amb file will allow you to decode b-format to any number of speakers up to 16 . In that case I dont think you could export directly to .amb in nuendo even with wigware , and it would probably at best just let you import the x,y,z/w. as four seperate tracks or one interleaved quad. You could edit their length etc then export them as seperate tracks and re-encode to amb with another piece of software though. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Questions about support of .amb file (Wave based)
Given Yvan's deep presence within Steinberg (custodian of the VST SDK and VST-GUI among other things), I rather assumed he has made his inquiry because this is indeed a possibility. The case needs to be made, presumably. Which is why debating the virtues and vices of the file extension may be distracting from the heart of the matter... Richard Dobson On 02/10/2013 19:24, Augustine Leudar wrote: but yes if you could get Nuendo to import .amb it would be brilliant . ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] , ambi playback configution and calibration
The point of that paper (as I read it, anyway) was not whether the technologies may or may not be available in 2020, but that they would be established and embedded such they they are almost routine, barely noticeable. In the way, for example, that taking a picture using your mobile phone is now routine. It just involves pressing a button. No special (and possibly expensive and otherwise superfluous) kit needs to be attached. You have a speaker which has an intelligent connection to the amp or player, and they talk to each other. You unpack the speakers, plug them in, and press a button. Maybe you won't even need to do that much. And, it has to be ~standard~ so that any player can talk with any speaker. Richard Dobson On 26/09/2013 12:50, Marc Lavallée wrote: Why waiting until 2020? It should be possible with available technologies. A Kinect camera (or two spaced cameras) could be used to detect the positions of the speakers from the listener's point of view, then the same Kinect could be placed in front of the listener to report its listening position. -- Marc Richard Dobson richarddob...@blueyonder.co.uk a écrit : There is still a little time - James Moorer wrote in his paper Audio in the New Millennium (JAES 2000): In 2020 loudspeakers will know where they are. ... ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] Sony PCM? (was Re: DTS Headphone:X)
On 29/04/2013 11:53, Jon Honeyball wrote: I have a pcm-f1 tape of the Zuccherelli stuff from 30 years ago, for those with long memories. Must pull that into a wav file, but my f1 has no digital output. Hmmm As it happens, I have a Sony PCM-701ES (incl SPDIF) with the CDP digital port added (designed, along with the SoundSTreamer it connected to, by Dave Malham), sitting around doing nothing. It cost several arms and legs when bought new, back in 1987. Last time I used it, several years ago, it recorded 16bit audio nicely to a bog-standard (and cheap) VHS recorder. My question is, simply, are these things still in use/demand anywhere (e.g. for recovering vintage F1 recordings, which I merely assume it can do)? I also used the CDP port to connect (via a tiny bit of DIY buffer electronics) to a now utterly obsolete but cute IDE-based 56001 dsp development card. The port gives you direct access to the otherwise internal serial data and clock lines. There is currently one on Ebay Buy It Now for £150 plus shipping. I guess shipping by UK courier would be around £25. I would only take the plunge on Ebay if I could be sure of a price good enough to justify letting it go. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Sony PCM? (was Re: DTS Headphone:X)
On 29/04/2013 16:59, Dave Malham wrote: A few months ago I had to sort out a PCM701 with one of my spdif cards in (the ones I used to do for Audio Design). We went through three PCM units before we found one that worked fully in replay mode (the original, one from the Uni and the final one, off Ebay). There seems to be something in the electronics that becomes increasingly unreliable with time in, I think, the clocking circuits which I find very worrying especially. Given the fact that archiving houses (in the UK in particular, the British Library) very sensibly bought up a lot of machines when HHB finally stopped sponsoring production, there aren't likely to be many working boxes around any more, so guard any you have that work very carefully! Dave PS I don't have any more of the spdif and the chip it was based on is no longer available so I can't make any more! Interesting - time for some testing. Last time I turned it on, it all worked, but that was at least 5 years ago, or approx when said cheap video recorder started chewing tapes. I have forwarded this to Archer Endrich; he may still have a few kits lying around. We are still scratching our heads about what to do with all this old CDP kit! Clarification: I just checked it, my model is the PCM 601-ESD (not the 701), it has its own spdif i/o as well as the CDP port. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Pitch(OT)
I am not clear just what the issue is here. C and A are defined by the distance between them; A is not a sharp C. All the notes are equally special, there is nothing otherwise special about middle C, and it is in any case only approximately in the middle for the modern concert piano. For most other instruments it is not in the middle at all. It is is the lowest note on the standard flute, almost the highest note on the bassoon, and by no means comfortable to sing for a bass voice. Notationally it is the point of symmetry between the treble and bass staffs (the current position of the clefs being relatively modern inventions, and relative to modern human vocal ranges); that is the only other sense in which it is in the middle. Of course C was originally Ut - blame Guido D'Arezzo for all that! And, if you really want to go all gooey about frequencies, there is always the Solfeggio movement to play around with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfeggio_frequencies :-) Richard Dobson On 26/04/2013 03:34, Robert Greene wrote: To each his own. I do not care for the creeping up of pitch. Yes of course re equal temperament. But the original subject was about 440 versus middle C-- pretty far off however one figures it. In just intonation (where C= (3/5) 440 if A 440 is the standard) middle C is 264 , it is still pretty far from 440! (which I suppose was the original point). Piano (equal temp.) pitch is a bit disconcerting but there is so much good music for piano one just learns to live with it. Robert ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] What does a mic with more than 4 channels give you?
On 26/04/2013 02:33, Robert Greene wrote: .. No relatively simple physical process produces exactly a correct answer over a small interval and then suddenly does not over a large interval. What is a relatively simple physical process in this context? Optical focus? Tuning of multiple strings to avoid beats? Stretching of strings (slack...taut...broken). Some would say most physical processes are non-linear to some extent; outside the region of an attractor, all sorts of nonsense breaks out. Add human ears and turbulent air into the equation and it is a wonder anything works at all. Sometimes we want a little fuzziness - Hollywood Magic = vaseline over the lens, n'stuff. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Pitch(OT)
On 26/04/2013 15:35, David Pickett wrote: .. For most other instruments it is not in the middle at all. It is is the lowest note on the standard flute, almost the highest note on the bassoon Have you heard the first note of the Rite of Spring - a C one octave higher? This note is playable by any decent bassoonist today. Of course, my mistake. , and by no means comfortable to sing for a bass voice. Really? Perhaps Russian basses! :-) Beethoven 9th asks the choir basses to sing a top D and that I can confirm is decidedly painful at modern concert pitch. At early 19th-C chorton it was hopefully a bit easier. Trained good singers can manage it, but (without going falsetto) it still does not come especially recommended! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] What does a mic with more than 4 channels give you?
On 26/04/2013 00:28, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2013-04-25, Fons Adriaensen wrote: For first order the 'extrapolation' works well up to a distance of around 1/4 to 1/3 of a wavelength. So, in English, what your subwoofer plays back is usually cut off at 80 or 120Hz. There the wavelength would be a bit over 4 metres to under 3. The ideal reconstruction area would be 1/4 of that, so a circle 3/4 to 1 metre in radius. Good enough for a living room sofa, definitely not good enough for a gallery or an open party. At middle C, 440Hz, you're downto under 20 centimetres. Ah, now found the source of the pitch thread. I have just wasted some time trying to find the original Pitch topic! Yes, middle C is not 440. A just Middle C (perfect major 6th down from standard A440) is 264Hz (~= 130cm), and will otherwise vary according to temperament, and beyond that the whim of players. Still far too many scientists want it to be, or believe it to be, exactly 256Hz for no better reason than having a sentimental devotion to powers of 2. There are school textbooks in print today which assert this frequency. A wavelength of 20cm is approx 1720Hz, so a flat top A. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Pitch(OT)
On 26/04/2013 20:12, David Pickett wrote: At 10:28 26-04-13, Richard Dobson wrote: Beethoven 9th asks the choir basses to sing a top D and that I can confirm is decidedly painful at modern concert pitch. At early 19th-C chorton it was hopefully a bit easier. Trained good singers can manage it, but (without going falsetto) it still does not come especially recommended! Yes, but mostly the bottom note is an A, with only once a G. And when you get to the important fortissimo top Es and Fs, do you leave them to the Tenors? :) David I have heard of choirs which do (and not just between bass/tenor). One trick is to include a few baritones. You could just call it strategic reinforcement. It is generally frecognised that the classic SATB division is a fairly poor representation of the full range of voice ranges. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Gran Sasso - first impressions
Needless to say, it would be even more interesting if they actually posted the IRs somewhere! If they have, it is very well hidden. Richard Dobson On 19/02/2013 17:28, Martin Leese wrote: ... Also, it looks like the University of Salford have already measured IRs of the original Stonehenge plus a completed replica using some sort of soundfield mic, visit: http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/res/fazenda/acoustics-of-stonehenge/ Regards, Martin ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Gran Sasso - first impressions
This is a great writeup! Needless to say I am delighted this project has worked out. I hope that it will prove not to be a one-off, and that other such places will also open their doors and caverns to acoustic sampling (not least: the LHC is off for updates this year, so will be raised back up to room temperature and become human-friendly for a while). While the exercise was of course primarily to record the spaces, it will also I hope help to alert physicists who may not previously have thought about their experiments in such ways to the possibilities and (at the very least) potential outreach value. When we (LHCsound) published our first batch of sonifications of variously real and simulated Higgs and other data from the ATLAS detector at the LHC, apart from significant media interest many composers jumped on the sounds and used them as the basis for all sorts of pieces (e.g. search for LHC Remix on Soundcloud). One of our sounds even got used by the BBC as part of a piece on CERN for The World This Weekend on radio 4. The LHCsound website was for a while overwhelmed by the number of hits. So even if in purely acoustic terms the sounds are comparable with those in many similar industrial spaces, it is clear that the fact of their source will be highly significant to many composers. Whether dark matter has the same cachet as the quest for the Higgs only time will tell, but I hope once the IRs are available, they will encourage many who may not previously have considered surround to explore the possibilities. And it goes without saying that I will be asking Gran Sasso researchers for some data to sonify at the earliest opportunity. So now may be a good time to dust off all those first-order panners and convolvers (especially the more accessible plugin ones), in case a whole lot of new users (possibly also new to Ambisonics) suddenly appear! Richard Dobson On 16/02/2013 21:27, Fons Adriaensen wrote: Hello all, Yesterday (friday 15/02/2013) David Monacchi and I visited LNGS, the Gran Sasso nuclear physics laboratory [1] and recorded some acoustic impulse responses of the spaces in which the Darkside50 experiment is currently being installed. ... ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] anyone in Gran Sasso region able to record an impulse response?
I don't remember posting the link to the BBC report. Anyway, it is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21340274 as well as some useful images, the acoustics of both the sphere and the enclosing tank are pretty clear in the video. The sound inside the sphere starts around 1'50. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21340274 Clearly the sphere is indeed just that, very much looking like a pressure vessel (the surrounding tank will be filled with pure water), probably not precisely spherical to optical grade, but close enough for jazz, and there will be a lot of stuff inside when all the detector units are installed. From my perspective the exercise is as much rhetorical as scientific. Obviously the recorded responses in air will not directly correlate to a sphere containing a lot of detector hardware,filled with borated-liquid scintillator inside a tank filled with water (though that IMO is an experiment that must be done one day). Dark matter particles, if any are detected at all, will likely be sparsely distributed in both time and space, so each detector hit will need all the help it can get in any sonification, to not sound like the world's most boring geiger counter. The detectors will record positional information, so of course an ideal sonification will be periphonic. The whole detector design is described here, from which we eventually learn the sphere is 4M in diameter: http://darkside.lngs.infn.it/ds-50/ Richard Dobson On 09/02/2013 10:45, Dave Malham wrote: On 8 February 2013 21:11, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: If it's indeed a perfect metal sphere it shouldn't be too difficult to *calculate* its response. I think a certain Dr. Helmholtz did this a yea or two ago, didn't he? Not quite in my lifetime, but... :-0 Dave 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 ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] anyone in Gran Sasso region able to record an impulse response?
Hi all, there is a new experiment about to start at the Gran Sasso laboratory (Abruzzo region, central Italy), to detect dark matter (featured on BBC News24 today). The business end appears to be a metal sphere, loosely comparable to a bathroom in size, which will soon be filled with argon. The presenter was able to climb inside to make the report, and the acoustics are, to say the least, interesting. Small and presumably heavily acoustically reactive. I have asked my one particle physicist contact at Cern to make inquiries about sampling it, if there is time. Is there anyone in that area able to jump to the challenge at short notice, ideally with a surround mic? It would have to be a hand-held or at least compact portable setup, as the access hatch into the sphere is human sized, but possibly too small to pass large-scale kit. My guess is that a mic, a laptop and a (small) balloon plus needle may have to do. The idea being, needless to say, that ~when~ some significant data is obtained, it can be sonified with an appropriate acoustic context. It would have to be a labour of love, on the assumption that getting a research grant for it at such short notice is rather unlikely! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] anyone in Gran Sasso region able to record an impulse response?
On 06/02/2013 14:58, Augustine Leudar wrote: I will be in Florence from April till July and have a six channel microphone Umashankas Velabn design which can be used for ambisonics of or just the raw channel recordings - I intend to cllibrate the microphone sometime this month - if thats any good - sounds fascinating ! The news report says the detector (including, presumably, the argon) will be placed inside in the next few weeks, which is pretty vague, but implies it will all be up and running by April. I hope to get some more inside info on the real timetable, but this does suggest there is unfortunately not much time to play with. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
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] an exploratory mail
On 21/01/2013 23:51, Gabriel Wolf wrote: ... Ambisonic's problem was that people were happy, a posteriori, to agree that AMB was inadequate, but were unable to agree on what a proper HOA format should comprise, except inasmuch as plain old 3rd order 3D (the maximum AMB supports) was not good enough. Not good enough in terms of ...? It only supports up to 3rd order periphonic (16 channels), as it relies on the number of channels (avoiding the need to store empty channels) being unambiguous, for each combination of horizontal and height orders, as they are up to that limit. It also presumes the conventional 3dB scaling of the W channel as per the original B-Format spec, and that is now regarded as both inconvenient and obsolete. A proper file format for HOA needs metadata in the header detailing the nature of the encoding, agreed channel orderings and idents (especially where unused channels are omitted). The AMB format has no metadata, just a WAVEX GUID identifying the format. Put most simply, the file header needs to supply all the information required to enable an appropriate decoding to be used. The file is fully self-describing, robust and unambiguous, so that any program can confirm purely by reading the header that the file is properly constructed, and can selectively extract whatever metadata is provided. Ideally it also needs to be efficient in storage, by excluding any unused B-Format channels. One solution that has been defined is to rely on lossless compression to do this, i.e. incorporate the compression into the file format definition itself. Also, AMB is based on the standard WAVE format with 32bit chunk sizes, so is only able to handles file sizes up to 4GB, which is seriously limiting for HOA with high-resolution samples (all the more so if empty channels are included). This was reasonable enough back in 2000, when the WAVEFORMATEXTESNIBLE format itself was very new, but is a serious limitation today. So, defining such a format is non-trivial, even if the core issues are clear. There are so many options, and nobody working in HOA (which as this list demonstrates continues to be a heavily research-active topic) really wants to have to deal with file format limitations. I would guess that MPEG will want a much narrower specification, and maybe base it on some patentable compression scheme, not least as their target speaker arrangement is ostensibly fixed. Whereas a defining characteristic of Ambisonics (HO or otherwise) is that while there are more or less optimum layouts, speaker arrangements are not fixed. In practice, those defining such a format need not only to define the file format itself, but also define and publish basic tools to create/encode and decode, to a suitably wide range of representative speaker arrangements; and of course to be able to confirm the whole thing with listening tests. As well as expertise, that requires considerable physical resources, to say nothing of the generation of source material for test purposes. One way and another, it is an expensive business! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA [RANT]
On 28/10/2012 23:12, etienne deleflie wrote: Hi Richard, .. The 4GB limit has been considered within UA. The wavpack format itself has the limit of 2^32 samples, which translates to 27 hours at 44 kHz (or 1 hour of 27 channels at 44kHz). The users who have been emailing me are all working at 24/96. I think the conclusion must be that nobody working in surround has any reason at all to be targetting CD, in which case they have no reason at all to use 44.1KHz. That is no longer the relevant basis on which to evaluate a soundfile format. .. But the point is that the 4GB limit is not a function of the UA spec, it is a function of wavpack. So UA remains a future-proof format ... albeit one dependent on another technology. Really, UA is more about fixed channel positions. The trouble is that in a sense UA isn't a file format at all, in the meaning of something defined formally and rigorously. It is a described procedure. It relies on the (external) definition of WAVE, plus the (private) definition of a wv file. In the end, any binary file format has to be defined literally byte by byte in terms of the type and meaning of each distinct field; 4 bytes for a magic name, 2 bytes for a bitfield, 4 bytes for size in sample or frames or whatever. And then there are further rules about higher levels of organisation: chunked? Order of frames in each chunk? variable-size chunks? chunks in any order, or in strict strict sequence? Available range of chunks? User-defined chunks? Endianness? Multiple instances of chunks? And so on. In the end the issue resolves to whether that byte by byte spec is fully public or not. If not, it is a private or proprietary format, which only authorised applications may read and write; e.g. by the developer signing an NDA with the company owning the format and maybe being required to use their API to deal with it. The WAVE format is still as valid now as it was when it was defined however many decade ago that was. In that sense it was already future-proof, except insofar as needs have changed and the initially fantastical 4GB limit is now no longer sufficient; in much the same way that a computer with 64K of RAM is no longer sufficient. In effect, the only aspect that disambiguates UA from any other wavpack-wrapped file is the text name required to be added to the wv header. By contrast, in a way the rules dealing with encoding coefficients etc are just a local detail. ... In any case, all inclinations are that file formats are an old-world thing. Notice how Apple's iPad and iPhone and iWhateverelse have no concept of files? ?? they do, behind the scenes. In the case of the iDevices, apps can be declared by the programmers to support shared files which are visible via iTunes; and any app can arrange to at least export files via the net. This is how all those music synth apps etc enable users to transfer files from their iPad to the host machine. Each app sits in its own sandbox, and can see only its own files. Of course the user interface does not provides anything recognisable as a system-wide file manager - apps do have a concept of files, but that is mostly (but not 100%) hidden from the user. Notice how people download apps, as much as they download content? Someone could easily create an album of spatial music, and offer it as an app ... which includes the speaker-feed decoding implemented with whatever channel scheme they wish. You could do that *today*. The file format is irrelevant. I am not aware that any mobile devices support more than stereo output with native hardware; but you could always send Apple or whoever a feature request. But you do make my point, that the details of a file format are in the end relevant to application developers; the more transparent (and simple) the process is to the user the better! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA
I received a message back from Jan-Mark Batke, to the effect they will pass my comments on to the patent authorities. It is classified at this stage as a disclosure. The four inventors are members of Technicolor, and the new system is briefly featured here: http://community.calrec.com/?p=8268 It does seem expressly targetted at cinema applications, so it remains to be seen how relevant it may be for musicians etc. I have (at last) updated by description page for AMB**, and have indeed added a link to the UA description. Now the attention in previous posts was very much on the phrase most sophisticated format, which was guaranteed to wind people up; whereas the key word is really available. The UA format is not really available to ~composers~ to use. The description is very much one for prospective developers - acquiring wavpack, and one way or another implementing all those equations (and apparently creating a WAVE file with a large number of silent channels!). The clue is for example in the observation on that website that no player is currently available; and when someone comments positively on a piece of yours, you are obliged to suggest they decode the file themselves, but Unfortunately, getting the software to decode ambisonic stuff is kinda annoyingly painful In short, for any file format to be deemed available there ~must~ be some associated application or set of applications that can be used to create, process and render a file. This means also that there must be no political or cultural platform aversions - to be available the format must have support not merely in Linux but, arguably much more importantly, in Windows and OS X. Users really do not need, or want, to deal with mathematics or complex configuration steps drenched in jargon. Reasonable defaults must be available, so a composer can launch an app, pan a sound as intuitively as possible, and write the file. And then automatically play it back. And send it to a friend who can also automatically play it back. To me this is obvious, which is why the publication of the AMB format (1999/2000) coincided with its incorporation in the CDP Multi-Channel Toolkit, which many people have used subsequently to make and publish AMB files. So until this situation materially changes, while AMB is clearly not the most sophisticated file format ~published~ it may still be the most sophisticated one ~available~. Whatever objections people here may have to AMB (and clearly they are legion), the one thing the Toolkit programs can justifiably claim is that they are not annoyingly painful to use. The only challenge, indeed, that they represent to the user is the basic ability to use a command line. I get a nice trickle of emails from people thanking me for their availability; sadly not so many of then go the extra mile and click my Paypal button :-(. So updates and extensions will be infrequent at best. So for those new file formats to become available is is down to those who can afford the time; university departments, etc. Richard Dobson **http://dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/researchdev/wave-ex/bformat.html On 25/10/2012 01:16, etienne deleflie wrote: So is this, in fact, the ultimate file format that folk on this list have been arguing for (and over) for so long? I dont know about ultimate formats ... but one existing format is Universal Ambisonic (UA). It is documented Here: http://soundofspace.com/static/make_ua_file And there is lots of material in this format available on http://soundofspace.com This format is my attempt to *conclude* on the many discussions we had here and on other lists. I don't pretend that it is better than other formats ... nor that it satisfies everyone's needs (even though it tries pretty hard). The point is ... other ambisonic formats exist ... and UA is one of them! ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA
Interesting (in its way), looks like a combo of HOA Ambisonic scene description (using multiple HOA streams possibly of different orders) and bandwidth compression; i.e. there is an encoding and decoding device as part of the application, as there would need to be, given that patents ultimately have to describe a device. It is indeed also a file format, which I would not have thought was patentable as such, but maybe anything is possible these days. The description includes in the first paragraph: The B-Format (based on the extensible ^iff/wav' structure) with its *.amb file format realisation as described as of 30 March 2009 for example in Martin Leese, File Format for B-Format , http://www. ambisonia.com/Members/etienne/Members/mleese/file-format-for-b-format, is the most sophisticated format available today. I guess I haven't played the system well enough - as the person who first published the amb format (not in 2009 but in 2000, in my paper for ICMC Berlin) it would have been a nice addition to my meagre CV to have been mentioned in a patent application. Perhaps I should write to them. The authors I think are probably known here, their names appear regularly at conferences etc: KEILER, Florian; (DE). KORDON, Sven; (DE). BOEHM, Johannes; (DE). KROPP, Holger; (DE). BATKE, Johann-Markus; (DE) So is this, in fact, the ultimate file format that folk on this list have been arguing for (and over) for so long? Richard Dobson On 24/10/2012 09:27, Roger Klaveness wrote: Hi, Just noticed this the other day: WO2012059385 DATA STRUCTURE FOR HIGHER ORDER AMBISONICS AUDIO DATA http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2012059385 I haven't read all the 75 pages, mostly looking at the pictures :-) But it looks like it's about combining different streams of HOA content with mono streams to be spatialized on the fly (sound objects). 1. Is data structures patentable? 2. If you exchange HOA with 5.1/7.1/9.1 beds it's looks a little like Dolby Atmos, combining prerendered surround with sound objects to be rendered on the fly Roger ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA
Hmm, well, that rather proves my point, and I will write to them. I have every confidence that that sentence was written ironically rather than hagiographically. Suffice it to say, I, Richard Dobson, did that work in 2000; and it appears the title to even that very modest piece of IP (embodied as it is in the free CDP multi-channel toolkit, which ensures the file format is available to composers) has been magically reassigned, such is the significance of a name written in a patent application, and the ineluctable power of a web page over a mere published conference paper. And yes one might very well question it, and the answer then must be the list of the other sophisticated Ambisonic file formats that are available today... Richard Dobson On 24/10/2012 12:15, Michael Chapman wrote: The B-Format (based on the extensible ^iff/wav' structure) with its *.amb file format realisation as described as of 30 March 2009 for example in Martin Leese, File Format for B-Format , http://www. ambisonia.com/Members/etienne/Members/mleese/file-format-for-b-format, is the most sophisticated format available today. With due deference to your work of 2000, Martin, in 2012 one might question whether that important work, is the most sophisticated format available today (?). Patents, patents, M ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] new and interesting words
On 12/10/2012 18:49, Sampo Syreeni wrote: .. but we seem to be hitting some interesting ones at last: my latest one was ossuary. Why precisely a language should have to retain such forms and why somebody should inject a word like that into the vocabulary escapes me. But once again it's pretty as a flower. Nice example. It is far from being a one-off. We have many words ending in -ary, from which one can see the pattern of meanings: reliquary antiquary aviary seminary bestiary mortuary library All come to us from Latin via French - or we invented them following the same roots. And not to be confused with all the words ending in -ory ... and -ery ... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Trans-Dimensional Portal
Oh well, looks like I am the odd one out, again...I am on FB, but under what for convenience I will call my stage name, which my friends know and understand but my music students or the idly curious will never find; On 08/10/2012 21:54, Fons Adriaensen wrote: In my case, the *reason* is that IMHO FB is a big swindle, and not stimulating anything positive, au contraire. I was not aware this was a requirement of a website. I doubt very much my own website stimulates anything much at all - hmm, donations via paypal remain conspicuous by their absence...so this must be the reason, then. Clearly the internet should be a commerce-free zone, like what it used to be, I guess. Earning money is so last century. Who pays for FB ? The advertisers. Who pays the advertisers ? The consumers who buy the product or services advertised. Hmm, not me - I don't buy anything. The adverts I see are all irrelevant, and sometimes amusingly random. And, really, not very intrusive. It's hard to believe they would find any paying customers at all. I think it amounts to rather less than the ultimate conspiracy theory. So in the end we, the consumers, are paying ourselves for being profiled, analysed and swindled by targeted commercial 'information'. The only thing I am paying for is my ISP; I use FB as a free resource. I rather suspect, au contraire, I am being swindled by my supplier of electricity and gas. With one or two exceptions, all my FB Friends are actually friends in real life. I don't spend hours on it (except when I forget to log off). I have had the odd useful chat with someone to arrange to meet up or whatever. I sometimes use it a bit like twitter (which I have yet to sign up to) without the 140 char limit, when it amuses me to do so. The most the profilers will get from me is random pictures of cute animals, flowers, or views of Stourhead (ho, dangerously valuable personal info there!), and the odd shared link of topical interest. Strangely, I see no adverts at all for either flowers or cute animals. But, I did close my LinkedIn account, as I really could not see the point of it, for me. YMMV etc. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] ANN: Update to Multi-Channel Toolkit
For anyone interested, with apologies for any cross-posting: just an interim update: the play program paplay has been updated with several new options, including chorder-style channel mapping to arbitrary device output channels, and a simple complementary multi-channel record program recsf has been added. For Windows and OS X (Universal Binary) as usual. Get it from: http://people.bath.ac.uk/masrwd/mctools.html Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone explain this ?
Re odd things heard: is anyone here a regular watcher of The Big Bang Theory show (E4, and on various cable channels)? There is a standard sting (a sort of semi-pitched noise cluster cum whoosh sort of thing, little more than a second in length) used to transition from one scene to the next. My stereo TV (full HD but otherwise cheap 32 LCD type) is in the corner of my lounge, and is in general not notable at all for significant stereo effects, much less anything more immersive. Obviously, the built-in speakers (a generous 2 * 6W) are the typical small tinny things. However, that sting, fleeting as it is, seems to produce a significant amount of pseudo-surround, very much ~not~ localised to the TV, such that every time it is really rather surprising. One day I will have to record and analyse it, but I haven't got around to that yet. Does anyone have any idea if this is just a random emergent feature of the sound (TV or room artifact), or has that effect been designed into it in some discernible way? Richard Dobson .. sometimes (depending on content), the result will be surprising, but tricks like these tend to fail on arbitrary content. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone explain this ?
My TV is just set to plain stereo, doesn't appear to have any other options such as SRS anyway. Unfortunately, moving the TV to another location is not a trivial operation. It is however hooked up to my stereo hifi (slightly more favourably positioned!), and the next obvious thing is to audition an episode on those. BTW: I was delighted to see an advert for Derby University in between episodes (on E4). Interesting scheduling - but I am not sure what message it sends! Richard Dobson On 07/08/2012 12:29, Peter Lennox wrote: Sounds to me like a cross-talk cancelling thing; with decorrelated material (reverb, sometimes crowd noise) it can produce startling surround effects. If this were the case, you should find that it occurs for some listening positions more than others (TVs with these algorithmns built in usually produce about 3 lobes - dead ahead and either side, about 30-40 degrees off the centre line. If you have a look at the audio settings, you'll probably find that the option for surround (is it SRS or something?- I forget) is selected - and if you changed to straight stereo, the effect should disappear. It doesn't usually work that well in a corner, and should be more pronounced if you brought the telly away from close-by reflective surfaces. The effect can be quite pleasing, but sometimes is disconcerting. Cheers ppl ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] ultra-cheap m/c USB cards for the R-Pi?
Yes, very much something like that. If it can be plugged straight into a standard Linux box and just work, with a m/c stream, then in principle it should work on the R-Pi. I am simply hoping to skip the trial and error stage (which could get expensive quite quickly!), by finding out if anyone has trodden this path already, with one or another of those devices. In particular, finding a device that eventually works if you configure it ~this way~ is preferable to finding a device that can't be made to work, given that the two may be indistinguishable to begin with. It would help if manufacturers and suppliers were rigorous about describing a device as class-compliant, but by no means all do, especially at the low end. Richard Dobson On 27/06/2012 08:01, Bo-Erik Sandholm wrote: Maybe you are looking for something like this £ 10,37 http://blog.rtwilson.com/review-asonic-external-usb-2-0-8-channel-sound-card/ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] ultra-cheap m/c USB cards for the R-Pi?
Hi, I am setting up my new Raspberry Pi (Debian Linux), and am interested in any comments, recommendations etc regarding the various really low-cost USB devices around (e.g under £40, some as little as £12) offering 5.1 or 7.1 outputs - e.g. Terratec, StarTech, Digiflex; in case any of them are worth taking a chance on to get surround out of the Pi. Obviously I am not expecting stellar audio quality (or anything better than 16/48), but they need to use chips that alsa knows about, such as C-Media and be as far as is possible a class-compliant USB device. I can easily build the multi-channel toolkit for the Pi, but there is no point if a surround output is unachievable. Anyone else exploring the Pi? Needless to say, a simple stereo USB card is no problem; I have my Edirol UA-1EX working nicely for output. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] The Sound of Vision (Mirage-sonics?)
On 12/06/2012 11:55, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 06/12/2012 11:32 AM, Richard Dobson wrote: It is also a concept that needs clarification not least with respect to questions of temperament - do people with absolute pitch insist on 12T Equal Temperament based on A=440? Or it is a broad categorical distinction, like recognising red as red and green as green? a co-student of mine who has absolute pitch perception expressed difficulty in sight-reading (and singing) old music at A=415 Hz (much like transposing on sight on a piano), but felt no discomfort on a bar piano at 437 (plus minus a few beers that had been poured in over the years) or on a crisp concert grand at 442. Interesting. While definitely not having absolute pitch, I count myself among the musicians (generally not string players) who for whatever reason find 440 a tad high, and who left to our own devices may well gravitate towards the old Philharmonic pitch standard of 435. The Berlin Phil regularly played and recorded at anything up to 452, roughly corresponding to the old English sharp pitch. The historical antecedents would be a great research topic; given that absolute pitch at least appears to be in whatever way a selective but innate (genetic?) faculty, it must have existed in one form or another well before pitches became standardised. It is well known, for example, that even within the same town, different churches would operate at different pitches, and that flute players, for example, had to carry around several alternative middle-joints (corps de rechange) in order to comply with widely varying pitch standards. Therefore, in those times, absolute pitch, if recognised at all, must itself have been somewhat relative. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Catching the same fly twice (and a curious question)
On 31/05/2012 01:27, etienne deleflie wrote: .. perception. I wonder if perhaps direction is *not* that important to spatial audio. Ofcourse, it is a part, but is it central? This view leads to the questioning of the value of higher order ambisonics. I don't think people are actually allowed to do that on this list - you are definitely living dangerously! I sense the wagons circling already. Richard Dbson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] audio point / audio plenum
On 18/04/2012 13:55, Gregorio Garcia Karman wrote: I reckon someone mentioned Stockhausen here but my enquiry is not related to a piece by him but rather to his british homologous, ie. one of the electronic music pioneers in England: Roberto Gerhard. Unfortunately there is not much documentation available relating to this work, as the piece was never performed. G plenum is a reasonably well-established word (though I can well imagine Stockhausen would find an esoteric meaning for it); and as we all know Gerhard had a mastery of the English language that surpassed what most native-born composers generally managed. See e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenum_chamber So I think it would be fine to treat it as a succinct expression of the idea of filling the space (um, soundfield?), but not necessarily with any more precise technical meaning, unless, perhaps, envelopment. Indeed, if anything it may specially signify the ~absence~ of a sense of directionality. (So I guess using HOA is specifically ~not~ indicated here...) Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Spatial music
On 14/04/2012 04:27, JEFF SILBERMAN wrote: .. soundstage envelopment and spaciousness)! Indeed, I would never replace my 3 front loudspeakers with a quadrilateral layout. Why three-speaker stereophony never became an end in itself is a mystery to me. It is not nearly as financially and logistically burdensome as surround sound and yet its benefits are very tangible. I would have thought the answer to that was fairly simple - the choice is simply not available in the places the general public buys hifi, such as: http://www.richersounds.com Note for example that you see listings for either stereo systems or Cinema systems. Anything that involves buying some extra piece of kit, such as a decoder, is out of the question - too complicated, and visibly more expensive. You need a do-everything amp with sufficient outputs at the back, and a simple switch offering, say, stereo, 3-ch stereo, quad, 5.1 (etc., with built-in automatic up-mixing if required - folk may shudder at the thought, but just deal with it). And packages not just of matched pairs of speakers, but matched triplets and quads of speakers - triplets being the weird combination for shops and customers alike. And of course those who do venture into 'real' hifi showrooms need to be able to hear such systems demoed, ~outside~ anything to do with cinema. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 09:07, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 04/13/2012 03:49 AM, Robert Greene wrote: While the mode of expression is even more emphatic than my own, RCFA is to my mind right all up and down the line. Talking about 3rd order is just castles in the air. As a theoretical mathematician, I spend most of my life building castles in the air. But one ought to know that that is what they are! you know, for every email you guys write about this tired old topic, i have _set up_ and _calibrated_ a higher order ambisonic system, and believe me, that's way more exciting. can you please stick your heads out the window eventually? it's 2012, bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, storage even more so [1]. there is absolutely no valid argument to be made against very high orders indeed for production and archival. That's not the point (well, at least, not mine). Out of the many choices available, which type of HOA system have you set up? What decided you on that choice rather than another? And which Higher Order would you choose as standard out of the many possibilities available? The closest to a consensus I have seen is third-order horizontal with second or even first-order height. For production and archival etc, should it be a free-for-all (= order creep), or would it be constructive to settle on one specific order (hybrid or otherwise) which everyone agrees to use as standard? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 03:08, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. If you promote G format, 99% would see and listen to this as a 5.1 surround file. (An 99% would listen to an UHJ as a stereo file, cos there are really very few decoders around. In fact, 5.1 seems to be way more mainstream than decoded UHJ.) Part of the issue seems to be that people want it to be known that this or that soundtrack or album uses Ambisonics. Without that piece of information, all 5.1 tracks are simply understood as 5.1 tracks, and the sound may be in some unspecified way better or worse than expected. This must be something of a dilemma - B-Format (and G-format) may well be the best example of art that conceals art. In just the same way that people geneally have no idea of the techniques used to record something - single-point, multi, or whatever. The engineer knows, and that is enough. And hope for a good review. Or... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 12/04/2012 18:31, Martin Leese wrote: sevas...@soundcurrent.com wrote: ... but for me, i'd really like some tools to use in film mixing (even with the distributed Ls and Rs speakers). anyone on the list care to tell me what tools might be best, or why it just won't work? the idea is to simply improve location and immersive aspects of film sound, whether played in a theatre or in home theatre. Cinemas are hostile environments for Ambisonics. ... Possibly I simply haven't been to enough high-spec cinemas, but I tend to the opinion that cinemas are fairly hostile environments for audio generally. Too often, dialogue + foley + sfx + music = a mess, immersive or otherwise. A person may see a film once in the cinema, but maybe many times at home, so strategically, at least, the latter should arguably be the priority. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to create a 1st-order CAF file. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented. It is supported in libsndfile (along with AMB), among other things. I might even add it to the CDP m/c toolkit, if anyone is still actually using it. There is no indication they have any interest in providing an in-house codec for B-Format - which would nevertheless be a strong way to establish it in the mainstream'. Those who want Ambisonics to become more widely established (aka mainstream) will need to talk to those who want it to remain a niche process for the cognoscenti. To do the former will by definition require some company or other to support it and present some de-facto standard implementation. If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible. I suspect that if Dolby et al, rather than define a single 5.1 surround format, had proposed umpteen options, arbitrary speaker positions, multiple user options for encoding and decoding, etc, the format would very likely not have been taken up at all. Sometimes choice is a good thing, but sometimes it is not. Every decision an implementer has to take, every option they have either to adopt or disregard, will reduce their enthusiasm for the thing by 50%, progressively. 5.1 is a shoo-in as there is just the one thing to implement, which everyone will use. Even 7.1 is a problem as there are a whopping two alternative layouts around. B-format has so many options and permutations available that the commercial enthusiasm factor will be down to 0.1% or less. So there is absolutely no danger at all of Apple locking in B-Format as it is all but un-lockable. That jelly+tree thing again. What you might get, on the other hand, is a hardware-based turnkey system aimed at a very specific market, such as IOSONO or Immsound, where they tell you only the absolute minimum information required to run the system, and it is probably closed beyond the possibility of opening. Unless of course they publish a file format for it Richard Dobson On 03/04/2012 19:14, Robert Greene wrote: I agree. My appeal for material to listen to was not intended as a call to get Apple to take over. The blood curdles. Robert On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Marc Lavall?e wrote: I would fear an applelization of ambisonics. Apple could impose its own ok format (probably as a CAF chunk specification) with patents and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my opinion). ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
The Apple lossless codec was made open-source last year. Richard Dobson On 03/04/2012 20:26, Rev Tony Newnham wrote: Hi What about Apple lossless compression, Quicktime - and so on? Tony -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Ronald C.F. Antony Sent: 03 April 2012 20:06 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote: Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to create a 1st-order CAF file. Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first order, they will have run out by now. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented. On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new. Most of the technology could be challenged because it's a derivative of EA IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even EBU's 64-bit WAV derivative is part of the open, prior art). ?? what patents? You are tilting at windmills. CAF is a file format (more precisely a container format), a standard to be followed, not a device (much less an algorithm) that can be patented. Did you think WAVE was somehow patented? Or XML for that matter? OK, if you put something such as an mp3 stream inside a file, then technically you need a licence to encode/decode it; but there can be no patent attached to a file format per se. See here for all you need to know about CAF (including how to implement it on other platforms). And note it is extensible in just the same way WAVEX is: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAF_intro/CAF_intro.html You can download it as a pdf. You will find no reference to a patent anywhere. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote: .. So why *not* do it, since it's really, really good even on the minimum four speakers? Good question. The answer is always given that first order is not good enough. The perfect really is the enemy of the good, or the better. You could call it order creep. .. Unless of course they publish a file format for it Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage up. :) Please do! My one (ho ho) mistake with AMB (published 2000) was that is it not extensible (I asked on this list, repeatedly, for what people needed, no response at all); only supports up to third-order. I naively thought that would be enough. I kept it a bit too simple by not adding a version field. And of course for HOA with 24/96 etc it needs a 64bit file format (such as CAF) anyway. Somewhere, people have been (apparently) designing the ultimate handle-everything file format (maybe even using CAF), but as far as I am aware it has not been finalised and published as a formal spec. There was talk of using FLAC, ogg, etc. Everyone argued incessantly about channel naming (people are fed up with WXYZUV etc), ordering, normalization regimes (e.g. getting rid of the traditional 3db scaling on W), embedding decoding coefficients (or was it encoding?) inside the header, all manner of stuff. So I have to wish you good luck... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:54, Marc Lavallée wrote: The CAF format is not patented, but there are patented file formats like GIF, ASF or PDF. Ah yes, I suppose those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The general issue arises when a file format pretends to be a container format but in fact specifically enshrines patented DRM, compression or other encryption algorithms (e.g GIF because of LZW compression, loads of such things in the monster that was/is ASF). PDF (having moved through a rather large number of versions) is now effectively free and open (now an ISO standard), available on Linux etc. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 02/04/2012 16:34, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. Maybe; but acoustic concert music is not the universe. But I can well see that the prevailing assumption on this list is that Ambisonics is only relevant to the reproduction of traditional music formats and idioms (yawn). Implication - composers trying to compose new sounds which do surround the audience should look elsewhere - or perhaps not bother at all? The spectacle of seeing people on this list for ever trying to promote this new system in terms of existing music, when stereo is actually good enough for that material already, is more than a little disconcerting. If it of any interest whatsoever to this list: last year Trevor Wishart completed a new 8-channel surround work Encounters in the Republic of Heaven. Reviews to date collectively suggest this work is very likely (a) a masterpiece and (b) universally accessible, e.g.: http://www.thebubble.org.uk/music/encounters-during-the-republic-of-heaven Needless to say he wrote a number of new software tools for CDP to manage his audio routing. Now, I ~could~ quietly suggest that he might consider a mix for 5.1 delivery using B-Format (currently all that is available to buy is a stereo mixdown), but if everyone sticks rigidly to the notion that music only exists in front, I see no point in trying. So, what ~is~ the point of this list, exactly? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Question about directional bands
Out of interest - what research has been done on this where the listeners were lying down? Do they hear such sounds still as above, or behind their heads? And, in the same vein, one the degree of such perception with respect to intensity? Richard Dobson On 01/04/2012 12:56, Robert Greene wrote: Actually, I think the ear/brain does not make this distinction without pattern recogntion, in other words, the height impression to the extent that it arises from spectrum of the sound depends on what the ear/brain expects the actual sound to be. There is a similar effect about frontal versus rear sounds. A natural familiar type of sound source can be made to sound behind when played in front if it is spectrally modified in the way it would be if it were in fact coming from hehind! Height perception similarly plays off the known sound spectrum versus the perceived one to determine height. But for height it is pretty crude--7-8 kHz tends to sound up even if it is not. Cymbals float up in perception even though the sound is familiar in spite of the source being not up. This is true in reality as well as in recordings. Robert ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Question about directional bands
Thanks for the ref. Pity, it is AES, which I am not a member of, and $20 is a lot to pay for a 29-yr-old paper of mostly anecdotal interest :-( Richard Dobson On 01/04/2012 13:36, Eero Aro wrote: Richard Dobson wrote: Out of interest - what research has been done on this where the listeners were lying down? The subject is not my area, but I know of an old paper: James Lackner: Influence of Posture on the Spatial Localization of Sound http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=4554 Eero ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] online multichannel release
On 26/11/2011 05:07, Sampo Syreeni wrote: .. As I said this may be the 'true way', but basically, IMO, it's yet another attempt by Apple to create yet another format 'the other lot can't read'. Fully agreed. Though then you'd have to agree it's a neat format per se. Well-thought out, as clean as de novo ones come, and perhaps the only new one which includes at least some support for ambisonic. It might be that we're a bit partial here, being that many around here like ambisonic. But you too have to admit it's a neat de novo design. Of course it only works for Apple, as an ecosystem. That's why nobody here really bets their livelihood on it. Just look at the logs and be assured of that. :) The CAF format is published, and is implemented in libsndfile. So any FOSS software linking with libsndfile automatically has, in principle, support for the CAF format. Possibly not fully comprehensively, but the trick is usually to ask Eric de Castro Lopo to add whatever you want. With 1001 variations on file formats floating around, he tends to prioritise what people actually say they need. There is nothing to stop third party developers (say, on Windoze) providing support for CAF files if they consider it important to do so, or if their customers ask for it in sufficient numbers to justify the man-hours. It would not surprise me at all if the Quicktime player on Windoze could read a CAF file, thought I have not got around yet to finding out, as I hardly use the PC for audio work at all these days. The general point is quite simple - the vast majority of soundfiles winging around the net are relatively short, and easily contained within the WAVE or AIFF formats people already understand, and have lesser or greater allegiance to. Ostensibly the only technical benefit given by CAF files is for huge files 4GB, and the chances are that few files of that size will be posted online, and fewer actually downloaded. The other reason is trivial - Apple is now on little-endian processors, so AIFF is less appropriate as a container. Reading one or two is no problem; reading 100s or 1000s of them involves a ~serious ~ amount of byte-swapping. Add to that the myth that CAF is a closed format, and the rest becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; Windoze developers and users will simply assume it is not viable for them. Note that it is perfectly easy to add 1001 speaker position IDs to a file format; not quite so obvious how to handle them in a playback application on a system that likely does not have speakers in all those positions ready and waiting. Someone can write the ultimate catch-all position-remapping code to route whatever arcane combination of speaker positions are specified to whatever other arcane layout the particular user has, if they have the time and the inclination. Could be a nice little research project; but testing it could be interesting. I see two choices - either you pre-map your sounds to the speaker and delivery layouts that already exist in the consumer universe, or you manage to define the layout you really want as a new standard which will magically be adopted by both manufacturers and consumers within your lifetime. The price of insisting on maximum generality and flexibility is that such a standard and level of adoption is unlikely ever to happen. This is of course exactly the problem Ambisonics sought to solve, but at the price of requiring decoding at the destination. But the same issue applies - the more general and flexible and specify-every-possible-option the spec is, the less likely it is that any product will implement it. It will remain the province of the research lab, and of the enterprising domestic experimenter with lots of spare time (and money). Just to add, for the sake of completion: Apple have made their ALAC lossless codec open-source, under the Apache 2 licence: http://alac.macosforge.org Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 23/09/2011 09:34, Dave Malham wrote: .. Anyone with a university login can search and download all IEEE papers freely via the IEEEXplore facility, even an unpaid external visiting research fellow such as myself. It would be nice if the AES provided a similar resource. Richard - the cost to the University is an order of magnitude greater for IEEEXplore access than it is for them to subscribe to the AES equivalent. This is, of course, partly because the IEEE library is very, very much larger. IEEEXplore is not cost-free except in as far as Universities decide to make it so to users. It _is_ a fantastic resource, as is the AES library. We've been trying here to persuade the Uni here to subscribe to the AES library for years, but with no luck yet - there are just so many other demands on the limited funds the library has available. Indeed. I still hope to try again with Bath Uni. I would guess it is probably an either/or issue, and as you say even though expensive, the IEEE archive is so much larger (and I assume covers a much wider range of topics) that it is the preferred option. As most of the people writing papers I am likely to be interested in are now presenting to DAFx, the need for me to subscribe to the AES dwindled considerably. People like myself really get more mileage out of core textbook resources unfolding an integrated studyable progression than from a multitude of individual papers. The Zolzer DAFx book is my pride and joy, even though at £75 (!) I suspect I have yet to make sufficient use of it to claim it has repaid itself. It has at most two pages discussing Ambisonics. Which of course is also why I continue to wait for a full comprehensive and authoritative reference book on Ambisonics covering all the post-Gerzon and HOA material which is presently scattered all over the place, partly in the archives of this list, partly in a smattering of papers here and there, and partly still tucked away inside the heads of the most active developers and researchers. The absence of such a text (what - forty years on?) makes me wonder whether much of the subject is in fact sufficiently controversial or debatable for any one individual to be not prepared to go quite that public. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 22/09/2011 00:52, Fons Adriaensen wrote: .. The only point I wanted to make is that the very concept of 'property', of 'owning' things makes sense only if it is recognised by others - it is a social agreement and not a law of nature. Well, lets look at that a bit more closely. Many people likely own things (or information) that nobody else knows about (secrets, in other words, or just extremely personal and private stuff). This does not make the ownership any the less. It does not fully fit reality to regard everything in the world as somehow managed or recognised by society. That arises much later in the evolution of a group. It is of course how many (who identify their individual self with that society) want to see it. The fact that society generally ~wants~ to know as much as possible about everything and everyone is evident, but not always acknowledged. It is simplest by far to declare that an individual had no a priori right of secrecy, ownership or privacy to begin with. Many a dictatorship has been built on that very principle. The problem is that what starts out as a seemingly objective sociological analysis, which it is assumed nobody would think to question, all too easily gets transformed into a moral imperative. This is any assertion of the basic form I want it therefore it is right, or, equally, I don't want it therefore it is wrong. The fundamental aspect of it is that it is ~personal~, even if, for example, God is substituted for I. At best, it is an ongoing public negotiation between personal privacy and public interest, moderated by a (nominally) independent and disinterested legislature. At worst, all it takes is a little reinterpretation. Darwin's famous survival of the fittest got changed very rapidly from the proper scientific meaning of best adapted to their environment to the strongest, and this instantly justified scientifically all manner of individual, group, and national aggression. Misuse (or, charitably, misunderstanding) of that phrase still pervades thinking today, and so it continues to be extremely dangerous. It led, among other things, to the journalistic hacking of mobile phones, an extreme example where the supposed supremacy of information outweighed all other imperatives. Information wants to be free (who said it first is irrelevant; who uses it as a rallying cry is very relevant) is of course much less extreme, but it is a moral imperative nevertheless - a justification for a desire. Many an oppression has been founded on the verbal rhetoric of an aphorism, as of course Orwell famously demonstrated, including the inspired ... but some are more equal than others. There are many variations of this basic pattern of moral imperative, of which perhaps the most pervasive these days is I want it, therefore it is my right. An increasingly common one is I deserve it therefore it is right. Both are expressions of a peculiarly 20th-Century post-war and growing narcissism**. It seems to be a fundamental aspect of an individual in a society (perhaps even a definition) that we are ashamed of our desires despite the necessity of expressing them (or the near impossibility of not expressing them), and will go to any lengths to represent them in some more acceptable form. Modern western culture is absolutely saturated in such moral imperatives, wherever possible taking the form of something quasi-scientific, ~non~-personal, so that they become immune to any sort of challenge, or, best of all, become effectively invisible, hidden so to speak in plain sight. It is not always a conspiracy, as much of the time it is done unconsciously, instinctually (so in that sense property is indeed a law of nature), but it is the mother of all memes. Without it most public media, particualrly the tabloids, would have absolutely nothing to print, and the speeches of politicians would become numbingly dull. The price, as usual, is eternal vigilance. Perhaps this is the time to resume normal service? Richard Dobson ** see for example The Narcissism Epidemic, http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1416575995 ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 22/09/2011 18:38, Robert Greene wrote: Wonderful! The whole point of science is to give the information to other people. Scientists have done and do just this, all the time - primarily to fellow scientists. On top of their myriad internal channels they have arXiv (open access), CiteSeer, Nature (which for 51 print issues a year is really very cheap) and any number of other readily accessible outlets, so I think they are probably doing as well as they can, especially given that most of the time they are prevailed upon by their Universities to raise their publication rate simply for profile and fund-raising purposes, all of which rather cuts into precious research time. Scientific information ought to be public domain. Anything else is a cheat of the intention of sciece. Only to the very limited extent that it costs money to distribute things should there be any charge. The AES ought to be ashamed of trying to line the organizations pockets by selling old reprints and reports. The AES (along with the IEEE, about which similar complaints are voiced) stands somewhat apart, as it is not strictly speaking a scientific organisation but (as the name indicates) an engineering (industrial RD) one - we might almost call the JAES a trade journal. You have to qualify to be a full voting member of the AES. So they are unashamedly commercial/industrial in orientation, not least because the majority of its members are too. It is not a prime outlet for science research in the way Nature is, it is more of a club for working engineers. Companies employing them typically subscribe to the large AES CD and DVD and online libraries, so that having to download and pay for an individual paper hardly figures at all. Anyone with a university login can search and download all IEEE papers freely via the IEEEXplore facility, even an unpaid external visiting research fellow such as myself. It would be nice if the AES provided a similar resource. To the independent developer and researcher of course, where every dollar matters, yes it is all rather expensive, especially when you can't check a whole paper beforehand to make sure it is actually useful. On the other hand, anyone can ask to join an AES working group - no payment involved. I am a member of the AES31-related group (file format, project interchange), on which I had precisely no impact (they went ahead and ratified the horrible RF64 file format anyway), and I find that as such I can still access standards documents, such as on the newly announced AES50 HRMAI (High resolution multi-channel audio interconnection), which may be of interest to this list (a dizzying 24 channels each way at 24/96 over Cat-5 cable), so the picture is not all bad. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 21/09/2011 09:38, Michael Chapman wrote: .. What purpose is that? Who decides what the purpose is? Unless one rejects inheritance taxes, wealth taxes, etc., etc. one is left with the fact that one has accepted a situation where one has 'a balance'. Perhaps the worst imaginable situation ... except all the others ... but there it is. Akin to all property belongs to the monarch and one holds it under licence, but nowadays society not the monarch. Those taxes pay for the police who I hope -if vainly- may catch your burglars and return your property. Last time I checked, taxes have to be paid with hard cash; and the principle has been long established at least in liberal democracies of no taxation without representation. If I could pay my tax by handing even 10% of my intellectual property (including knowing how to teach people to play the flute, which I also consider part of my personal IP) to the state, that would be great. Of course, that skill (however uniquely and inventively expressed) is not patentable anyway. Remember, the original proposition was Intellectual property... does not exist naturally - it is something granted by society to individuals, which I regard as mere sophistry, at best - a typical example of what I could call GPL fundamentalism, in which information wants to be free remains the most daft pseudo-anthropomorphic statement ever said by anyone. information is an abstract mathematical or philosophical concept, possibly a thing, but definitely not a sentient life-form who wants anything. This may all be OT, but if: -ambisonics had developed twenty years later -if there had been no patents on it would the World have been different? Probably not. The issue with Ambisonics has never been the technology, nor even with the patents; it has been with imagination (how to present it) and ambition. The latter is now expressed, as I have argued hopelessly here before) in the deprecation of good old first-order (even over four speakers!) in favour of HOA which remains utterly beyond the scope of a mass or otherwise popular market. The core patents in audio have all been for lossy compression tools, which have enabled a huge range of affordable toys for people, demonstrating the power of something that is palpably flawed, but nevertheless for most users good enough. That is where the big money and distribution will always be. It could have been a vehicle for new potentially with-height content (where even POA is manifestly better than what we now have in 5.1, which nevertheless also qualifies as good enough), whereas discussion at least on this list has become concerned almost entirely with adding a bit of extra ambience or realism to stereo, something of importance to perhaps the 0.0001% of the population who pay 4-figure sums for their amps and 5-figure sums for their speakers (and probably 3-figure sums for their cables). So it is irrelevant whether there are any patents on it or not, as it has very little the behemoth that is the audio/music industry will be interested in enough to change direction, now. Had it been used for the original soundtrack for Star Wars or Close Encounters, it would have had a chance. It wasn't, dedicated tools for composers (FOSS or otherwise) scarcely exist, and the rest is history. Fons has referred to things, including IP; but Ambisonics is not a thing, it is an idea, and an increasingly polymorphic one at that, which may or may not be a Good Thing. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 21/09/2011 17:11, Marc Lavallée wrote: .. Information wants to be free is a 40 years old aphorism, not a scientific statement, and it does not come from the free software movement. Its author said later: Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.. More like 27 years. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free So, two anthropomorphic statements, which form an opposition or an extended oxymoron. Perhaps a bit like money wants to be free. According to that page, Stallman reformulated it to use the phrase generally useful information together with the inevitable should - without indicating who or what decides what qualifies as generally useful. Presumably the same disinterested people (anyone other than the author, in fact) who decide whether to 'agree' I own something, or not, as the case may be. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 20/09/2011 20:38, Fons Adriaensen wrote: On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 02:15:19PM -, Michael Chapman wrote: .. Intellectual property, just like property of physical goods, does not exist naturally - it is something granted by society to individuals in the hope that society will benefit by doing so. If that doesn't happen there is no reason why it should exist. Wow. How far back in time does this arrangement go? Which came first - the individual, or the society? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [ot] another patent
On 20/09/2011 22:24, Fons Adriaensen wrote: .. Wow. How far back in time does this arrangement go? Which came first - the individual, or the society? That doesn't really matter. If a number of individuals interact you have a society. Once that happens, things are 'yours' only because the others agree the are. Such agreements arise because they bring mutual benifit. Interesting choice of words. You say agree, I would say recognise. Do they put it to a vote? My thoughts (which you appear to equate with things) are my own, and if I choose to share them with anyone else that is my choice, and their privilege. The alternative is living isolated, or having to physically protect and defend your 'property' all the time, which sort of defeats the purpose. What purpose is that? Who decides what the purpose is? Unfortunately, not all societies are so enlightened. The days where one needed no lock on one's front door are long gone; if they ever really existed much anyway. I have been burgled three times, by individuals (aka society according to you) who clearly did not agree that my Tannoy DC200 dual-concentrics, or my gold signet ring with the family seal on it inherited from my father, belonged to me. Am I now supposed to agree that they really owned them all along? Seems to me there are plenty of people around who would treat my thoughts in the same way, if they could. Perhaps a few of them are even on this list. You just can't slap a GPL licence on a person and call it natural. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] another patent
On 19/09/2011 15:21, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. The 20 minutes per application might refer to a specific step, Probably the pre-filtering to eliminate the umpteen patents for free energy machines, teleportation devices, anti-gravity drives, kitchen-table fusion reactors and $2 solutions to world hunger. The 20mins would be to allow for the possibility there might be something in it. I'm still hoping. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
On 11/08/2011 17:08, Charlie Richmond wrote: On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 09:02, Michael Chapmans...@mchapman.com wrote: DID YOU KNOW ... LinkedIn ... helps you control your public image How true ;-( Yeah - according to linkedin they were only supposed to be sending this out to email addresses of my contacts who were already registered on LinkenIn. Personally I think Google+ is far better and will take over Twitter, LinkedIn and eventually even Facebook, but it will take time... In the meantime the sursound mailing list is only one of two I'm on that actually thought I really sent that message. All the other 40 or so rejected it. Well, I'm on it (and accepted the personal invitation BTW), but am only on it at all because an ex-student asked to put me on her list, and it seemed churlish to refuse. I have no idea what to do with it though, or why this or that person pops up every once in a while to ask me to be a connection. I am unlikely ever to cold-call anyone unless I have some massively good reason to do so, and needless to say nobody has asked me a question, offered me a job, or whatever it is that people on LinkedIn use it for! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] the recent 2-channel 3D sound formats and their viability for actual 360 degree sound
On 20/07/2011 09:53, Dave Malham wrote: ... Sorry, but their blurb reads like snake oil sales talk so I called it that. It wasn't a comment on the system - since I haven't heard it and have no technical information to go on, I couldn't do so. It would, of course, not be unknown for companies who want to keep IP secret to deliberately obfuscate things Hmm, reading through this, it seems that basically they've discovered MPEG4 Spatial Audio Object Coding :-) An interesting part of that feature was the discussion, such as it was, of the location of the music in a strongly spatialsed scene. Of course, with a vanilla cinema surround scene, where nothing actually sounds particularly realistic spatially (beyond crude panning), having some disembodied music track is a familiar thing relying on the same automatic suspension of disbelief which allows us to imagine there is no camera crew in the scene either, and accepts the sound of explosions in space. But in a genuinely spatialised scene, presumably with the goal of hyper-realism, the music, apparently, remains ... perfectly isolated and anchored above and well forward of the screen. So - noisy pterodactyls and dragons are mixing it with the brass section. How weird is that likely to sound? Especially if the music track itself has been recorded in surround the way so many people enthuse about here? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Fwd: Bass Problem in crosstalk cancellation
On 13/06/2011 18:30, Stefan Schreiber wrote: Robert Greene wrote: The point I am trying to make is that there are ALWAYS higher frequency components, except for the eternal om that started before time began and that will continue into all eternity.(No offense I hope to believers in the religious content here). Only that type of signal can be without higher frequency components. Something that start and ends as nothing Au le contraire! Without being a specialist in Indian music, I would expect that om contains LOADS of overtunes, because a mere sine wave sounds inherently un-Indian! :-D Hmm, well, the dynamic range of the universe may very likely be infinitely large, but [un]fortunately our mortal ears are not, so that startup transient from years back has decidedly faded into the expanse of the numinous, and is no longer apparent to the casual listener. Very gratifying, nevertheless, to find scientific theory so deeply at one with the mysticism of the unstruck sound. Everything we hear is indeed an illusion, while everything we cannot hear is the true reality. I struck a note on one of my singing bowls a few days ago. My ears can no longer detect its tone, but the above theory assures me that it is assuredly still singing, and moreover its Cosmic Vibrational Energy thus raised will never stop. I do not always manage to persuade people of this, but at last I have an irrefutable scientific basis for it with which not even Mr Dawkins could possibly argue! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] HOA standards (was: Re: Minim AD7 for sale)
people can keep their five existing satellites and sub and just add one more to get the full effect. If the sub provides the speaker outputs, as my C-Labs one does, that could be a problem - I would have to replace the whole system. Don't fancy that, really - can adding one speaker really make that much of a difference? Star Wars already sounds pretty cool with just the five, and nobody has complained before. It remains fascinating to me, (but profoundly un-useful) to see even the recent debate lead to accounts of half a dozen alternate layouts using typically a mere ten speakers (but could be eight, could be twelve, maybe tenth-order...). How on earth do I, short of a luxury live comparison test (and a fatter wallet than in my entire life so far) possibly choose between them? More to the point, how does the industry? I am sorry to say it, but I do not see anything that the industry could possibly be interested in. HOA is jelly waiting to be nailed to a tree. I think it is great, and I will find a way to use it I can afford, but it all looks suspiciously like yet another way to turn a large fortune into a small one. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 02/05/2011 02:30, Stefan Schreiber wrote: . 1. Maybe this is your new definition. But then: B-format and .AMB are identical. The notation .AMB (or .amb) should be reserved to refer to the file format that uses that extension. As defined, it assumes the FMH recipes for B-Format; only in that sense are they quasi-identical. By no means does everybody endorse fmh; thus there is or will be some new file format designed to be both more general and more comprehensive (4th order and above, etc), and which might more credibly stand as a full synonym for B-Format. Really, that title is generally understood to apply to the subject as a whole, from UHJ to a sixty-speaker rig and beyond, rather than to some specific embodiment of it. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 02/05/2011 05:59, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 05/02/2011 12:09 AM, Richard Dobson wrote: ... what is all this talk about smallest acceptable? Well, if I put together a proposal for an eight-speaker cube, which is ostensibly limited to first-order peri, would that be received with nodding of heads or derision? The horizontal relationships I understood a while back, and have even had the occasional opportunity to play with (I can even do six at home, in a too-small space, albeit with very unmatched speakers), but the business of including height has been far less well documented on this list, except for some very large and manifestly permanent multi-speaker installations - double layers of eight, etc. I have yet to hear any B-format with-height rendering of anything. It may yet prove to be totally impractical to run a mobile with-height rig to take into schools or arts centres (at least without a large team of assistants and hours to rig and de-rig), but one has to ask. It may be worth making the point that I am not aiming to use this to play back refined B-format recordings of orchestras etc; but purely synthetic material representing collision events in the LHC, where the general direction of something reveals information about the physics, and where the mandated goal is to inspire kids with the science of the thing. If it inspires them to get interested in periphonic surround, that would be a bonus. It is primarily a science project, and would be funded most probably from a science outreach budget. So all my questions are in relation not to a plain horizontal rig but to the simplest viable affordable way to set up a with-height one. I would happily settle for a whopping 20 degrees of separation. But unfortunately, for the physics increasing distance from the interaction point is equally important (we currently represent distance by time - a scan of the detector). That could be tricky, to say the least. May be impossible (though I will aim to include some form of hrtf decoding VEP-style over headphones as well). Something a bit like fireworks. It would be nice if a plain cube would be good enough to give an idea of it. But if that really is totally unrealistic, I am better off not trying for with-height at all, as setting up a really large array is physically impractical as well as prohibitively expensive; I will leave that to the Allosphere people (at least until the Science Museum can be persuaded to build it). I would like something sufficient to work as proof of concept, while clearly acknowledging that a bigger budget etc is needed to do it full justice. .. .. i'm pretty sure that the effect you heard was not due to the performance of first-order ambisonics, but rather * because you had visual cues (the reinforcement system may have created a sense of striking nearness, and your visual system filled in the localisation), and * because you're an ambi fanboy. that's not meant in any derogatory sense. i've been flabbergasted time and again how people could be totally unimpressed by first-oeder ambisonic systems that to me were between pretty good and totally awesome. Well, indeed. The show I went to was not in any sense showy, the diffusion was in lots of ways subtle and if anything understated, just there as a quasi-PA to support the performers. It was the ultimate lesson in how reinforcement should/could be done. I had already been to enough iffy e/a concerts (to say nothing of Glastonbury and the odd rock gig) to appreciate the differences. The sweet spot was clearly wide enough, as I was very off-centre and even somewhat high up; certainly above the level of the singers. I was in fact ~expecting~ it to be wrong at my position, given what I then knew or thought I knew about Ambisonics (which was entirely first-order stuff at that time - hadn't even heard of order as such), and remember being very surprised at how good the localisation was way off-centre. it's still a conjecture, and i haven't tried to confirm it experimentally, but i'm convinced that lower-order ambisonic listening takes training - when your brain has learned to discard all the bogus cues, the curtain opens. Fair enough - most listening takes practice, at least, anyway, if not actually 'training'. I am personally very un-visual, so the visual aspects are a major distraction for me, and I habitually listen to concerts with eyes closed unless I have some other reason to peek. .. what people want is to feel like single speakers are shouting abuse at them, and our way to world domination is to deliver that first, and then gently show them why their current frame of reference is defined by the shortcomings of the system leading the market, not by any actual necessity or aesthetic choice. Hmm, well, I am not at all sure I do want to feel that, but I am open to being persuaded when the opportunity arises! Richard Dobson
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 01/05/2011 03:55, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. It is fair to say that 1st order AMB is good (or good enough?) for some things, but it is not perfect surround sound forever. Some people on this list are actually using 2nd/3rd and higher order Ambisonics, and I think that any good standard should consider different applications/requirements. Sounds reasonable, and I would be much inclined to agree, but the problem is that there are so many different applications/requirements, that catering for them all (where all seems to be uncountably large) leads ineluctably to extreme complexity. The ultimate support-everything HOA file format (along with the tools with which to create and use it) has yet to be announced, as far as I am aware. Frankly, if .AMB format includes B format (1st order), I don't see any fundamental conflict at all . The .amb format (simple fmh recipes) supports up to 3rd order, as the channel counts for each combination are unambiguous. The issue for me is no so much the encoding (though asking content providers, a.k.a. composers, to supply even a 9-channel file is IMO pushing it), but the decoding, where the number of speakers required seems to have its own version of Moore's Law. If encoding in 3rd order means you can get a[n even] better decode to 5.1, well and good; easy enough to understand why game developers would do that, to get the best possible experience over the one truly existing and established surround standard. For outreach purposes (promoting periphonic as well as horizontal surround, promoting composers working with space) people need to talk up the simple affordable layouts and delivery formats rather more than has so far been done. The vast majority of works posted to Ambisonia have been plain 1st-order; a few IIRC are second order. So managing with the smallest possible channel counts at both encode and decode stages remains IMO an important strategic as well as an engineering objective. The danger with the arguments that, say, third-order is actually not good enough is that commercial developers will just not touch Ambisonics at all, since it is a territory that is forever changing and remarkably lacking in consensus. It has taken long enough for 5.1 to reach lower price-point DAWS. When even 7.1 is exotic, nobody is going to make a DAW with a 16 channel bus only to be told a year later that we need more. Have any listening tests actually been carried out to establish what typical users consider to be sufficiently good localization? The higher orders are sold as offering the most precise localisation; but it seems to be more of an assumption than a proven fact that localization (as distinct from separation) at that level is actually desirable. At the end of the day, the problem is that HOA is not one standard but a multitude of them - each combination and size of order, and size and shape of speaker array, constitutes a separate standard. So the final question is: if you had to choose just ~one~ HOA standard for general production and delivery, to embed in the modern equivalent of the AD7 (or in some future generation of Logic Pro), what would it be? Or is that question simply unacceptable in principle? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 01/05/2011 12:50, Svein Berge wrote: .. Another anecdotal answer, which doesn't even quite address the question: The difference between 1st order horizontal and 3rd order horizontal is easy to hear for the common man. Using 5.1, or some other arrangement? The colloquial assumption or implication behind the use of the word difference is that one presentation was better than another, but strictly speaking all it says is that people noticed some difference. Adding reverb makes a difference (some folk claim that directional cable makes a difference), but more is not necessarily better. So it would be good to have some elaboration of what form the listening tests took, and what difference really means here. This was one of the conclusions of the harpex listening tests, and in line with previous tests by Stéphanie Bertet et al. More interestingly for us, of course, was that you can get 3rd order localization from 1st order material with the harpex decoder. But no decoder can make meaningful 3D material from a horizontal source. So if I had to choose between 3rd order horizontal and 1st order 3D, I would choose 1st order 3D any time. Personally, I am more than happy to accept a little dithering in my localisation (especially as it is probably fairly well dithered in real life already), if it means I have to buy fewer speakers. So I suspect I would agree. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 01/05/2011 17:25, Marc Lavallée wrote: I have a naive question for experts: would it be possible to recreate the acoustics of the Philips Pavillon using room simulation techniques and ambisonics spatialization? That is what they/we did for the Virtual Electronic Poem Project: http://www.edu.vrmmp.it/vep Sadly I never got to hear the final result. My contribution was strictly compositional (composing the sound routes in the almost complete absence of original data - the original 30-channel perforated control tape which controlled both the sound movements and the visual elements exists physically but is unplayable). The acoustic reconstruction was handled by the Berlin team. The project is described in CMJ 33 Vol 2, andd presetned at ICMC 2005; I don't know offhand if the CMJ paper is downloadable externally anywhere. As is the way of such things, it is rare indeed to get any funding etc for follow-up work, so the reconstruction software is probably stowed away somewhere obscure, never to see the light of day again. You would need to contact members of the team to see if any sort of access is possible. We always hoped to be able to create a publicly usable model of the space that could be used e.g. in Csound, so composers could explore their music as it might sound in that space. For the acoustic modelling they created a huge amount (GB-worth) of hrtf impulse responses for every speaker (350 of them), for a particular central listener position. These were cross-faded according to the head-tracked motions of the listener. The modelling was pretty comprehensive, even taking into account the properties of the interior surfaces. Resolution was 1deg horizontal and 5deg vertical. The binaural rendering was programmed in SuperCollider, and the newly published SuperCollider Book (MIT Press) includes a chapter on this aspect. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 01/05/2011 20:29, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: .. the point is: if you want to produce in tenth order and have the means to do it, your customer can still enjoy it on his/her 2nd order rig. Fine. I agree. But what exactly is a '2nd order rig'? Some number of speakers, or the combination of source, decoding and layout? All I am asking is, what the smallest acceptable entry-level setup is. It used to be first-order horizontal, and four speakers, or 1st-order peri and 8 speakers. Clearly that is no longer acceptable - but what the new entry-level is is still less than clear to me. From the above it would appear to be 2nd-order source played over whatever the smallest acceptable 'second-order rig' is defined to be. .. the bus width restriction is actually a bogus argument, which is only true in practice because that's how avid and friends milk their customers. heck, going from a 16ch bus width limit to 32ch should not ever include more than a recompile on decently written software. Depends to what extent it requires GUI features. At the moment the typical DAW draws all sorts of stuff for each channel of the main bus. Without the need to draw flashy graphics, I totally agree. We can do it in Csound already. 95% of the cost of any GUI application is the graphics. I am still wondering what a full native HOA DAW (with height and full automation) would look like. how can localisation and separation be distinct? I think the two words are too useful to be treated as exact synonyms - that would mean one of them is simply wasted. So I would say the former is absolute - this or that degree azimuth. The latter is relative - A is 20deg to the right of B (or even, 2M behind B). If that's not a useful distinction, OK. if two sources are, say, 20° apart, it's very hard to separate them when you're sitting in the precise sweetspot of a FOA system, and totally impossible outside. All I can say is, my memories are different - I saw/heard very accurate localisation and separation in a live Electric Phoenix gig at the Arnolfini, Bristol, maybe 20 years ago as I mentioned before - the amplified voice was localised so that you heard each voice ~exactly~ at the position the singer was in. They were some 40 feet away, so very much less than 20 degrees, and I was sat a long way left of centre, in raked seating. The effect was somewhat jaw-dropping; and as far as I am aware, that was all first-order analog panning, engineered by John Whiting. Of course, it was an auditorium-sized space. Dave Malham may know what order he was actually using as he probably designed the decoder - if it was HOA I will fully and gladly acknowledge my misunderstanding. I have no memory at all of the number or location of the loudspeakers. Sadly I live at the opposite end of the country from all the UK Ambisonic centres of excellence, so my prospects for hearing the state of the art and being duly persuaded thereof are presently fairly remote. .. that is utter nonsense. the most important selling point of ambisonics is precisely that it decouples the transmission format from the speaker layout. I know that. I make that very point myself often enough! But your own words appear to conflate decoding order and speaker rig together. There is your input HOA order, and the sufficient speaker rig which plays whatever you decode into it. Either way, your 2nd-order rig is a nominal combination standard that in practice combines the order of the decoding and the speaker layout into some single named entity. As I said, I am just asking for the lowest acceptable rig. Just in case I can by some miracle get a grant to buy the kit without the proposal being shot down by referees. But in the absence of cheap and willing roadies, the fewer speakers the better! I will reluctantly accept that FOA is no longer enough; that must be kind of disappointing though for all those who posted FOA tracks to Ambisonia. .. all that DAW manufacturers need to learn is that marketing and sales should have no say in how wide the busses can be - if you leave that to the techies, the answer is arbitrarily wide. Well, we can but hope! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale
On 30/04/2011 01:12, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 29 Apr 2011, at 19:15, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: .. I sometimes wish these people could be locked away in a closet and released only after 1st order Ambisonics is sufficiently accepted by the audio community at large and the consumer electronics and computer software makers. Maybe we might get somewhere that way. I remember arguing much the same point ten years ago (or eleven - AMB was announced at ICMC in 2000) - and got precisely nowhere. The preoccupation on this list has always been the pursuit of the best possible, defined as mm-perfect localization over a more or less large area, with cost and number of speakers no object. While for mere users the attraction of a format is clearly in inverse proportion to the number of speakers required, and to the the number of decisions they have to make before pressing play. Those discussions about the ultimate HOA file format (4th-order or better, no doubt) are, I imagine, still ongoing. Worse than useless to anyone still pondering whether to go up to a full 5.1 system. And of course there is absolutely no mileage whatsoever in any research application dealing with first-order. Any such application would, I have no doubt, be likely shot down in flames by those asked to referee the proposal. I even have such a project in mind - periphonic sonification of LHC collision data. There are reasons enough why such a project would get short shrift from the powers that be, but one of them would certainly be should be using at least third-order. So I fear the battle for Ambisonics has already been lost; it remains a niche interest for a few researchers and individuals with the time, money and space to indulge it. And then there is Wavefield Synthesis... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Exciting news anyone?
On 01/04/2011 14:22, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 04/01/2011 01:55 PM, Richard Dobson wrote: On 01/04/2011 10:37, Svein Berge wrote: ... of the development. Since this plugin in practice requires the use of a soundfield-type microphone, which is not really a mass-market product, I hope composers are not entirely disregarded in this, which seems to me to be an unnecessarily limited assumption. They will likely be producing (DAW-permitting!) a B-Format stream synthetically; i.e. the stream comes directly from the host, not from a microphone. Indeed I will likely be doing this soon myself, as one obvious thing to do with LHC collision data is to sonify in surround. iiuc, it doesn't make sense to use harpex for sonification. harpex' strong point is to sharpen first-order natural recordings and thus increase the versatility of a tetrahedral microphone. to get sharp localisation for panned monophonic events, just use higher order ambisonics. Well, yes, fair enough; but that rather highlights the feeling that one would be paying rather a lot for what is only a first-order decoder, notwithstanding all the refinements. As Dave says elsewhere, the display is really what sells it, and from my point of view it rather successfully evokes a 2D view of (say) the ATLAS particle detector, e.g. along the beam axis. As our current project is focussed on outreach into schools (and the wider community where we can), such display tools would clearly contribute greatly to the impact of the exercise, even if we end up rendering mostly to stereo or headphones. Having a multi-speaker periphonic rig is unlikely to be a priority for schools any time soon, sadly! But if it can be justified under the science budget, who knows? So I am likely to be more than happy to stick to first-order for the time being. Many other prospective users may feel the same. But my point was in any case more general than that; there are many composers out there using plain 1st-order (as evidenced by so many of the tracks on Ambisonia, etc), and the plugin has an obvious relevance to them, even though they neither own nor feel the need for a tetra microphone. As for income etc, take a look at the new iPad 2 (dual core). It only has the single mic input, but can pass Dolby digital surround out via Apple's AV adapter (HDMI output). So the possibility to record a sound and spin it around the user, with that cool display, even if only as a glorified toy, might garner enough purchases (NB low price, high volume) to pay for all the RD! Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Subject: Re: Why do you need to decode ambisonic/b format signals ?
On 26/01/2011 17:49, Augustine Leudar wrote: Hello all, and thankyou for your wonderful and informative replies. There is a lot to learn it seems and I will no doubt pose other questions after Ive read more and digested what has already been said. David - 56 channels ! I would have been drowning in a spaghetti of cables and tape I think. I dont know the speakers you speak of but please let me know if you remember what they are called. In regards to the speakers - yes we are looking into buying some tropical proof weather speakers. I believe Eden had some type of all weather speakers before but even they didnt last long. Put it this way - even keeping a mains supply is difficult in the biome - ants chew though everything (literally) and the humidity is fercocious - Ive heard there are some self draining military grade speakers around and any suggestions are appreciated. The thing is even speakers designed for subtropical conditions may not hack it - they really have to be specially designed for really really humid conditions (we can treat them with antiant stuff ) There are underwater speakers (used in swimming pools among other things); might they be any use? Not hifi but it sounds like hifi + water don't mix well anyway. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] 3DAA | Audio Alliance
On 22/12/2010 22:59, newme...@aol.com wrote: .. Maybe we just declare a standard? Fast track: - Ambisonics up to 3rd order, including mixed order systems - Channel order, coefficients: Furse-Malham system - B format is included (soundfield recordings) - standard configuration (within the standard... ;-) could be 3rd order horiz. + 1st order vertical, maybe 3rd order horiz./2nd order vert. for studio and cinema use. I remain convinced that such a thing will Never Happen. Too many variables, choices and permutations, as this list continues to demonstrate. Anything that is proposed will inevitably fall foul of multiple disagreements. And ostensibly there are no patent opportunities around which a business model can be built. Notwithstanding the above sad prognosis - I wish a Happy New Year to everyone (the Solstice has been and gone), and a Happy Christmas if that is what you do. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
