> > Your dissertation question clearly touches something important, but lacks > focus. > By that, I mean (in a caring way, possums) that framing the question this > way makes it very difficult to elicit clear answers.
A better way to frame the question might be: "Given ambisonic's lack of commercial success and lack of content, why has it persisted for so many years?" And the answer might include things such as: - engineering minds are drawn to its mathematical elegance - audiophiles are drawn to its capacity to reproduce the experience of listening to music mediated by specific performance venue acoustics - contemporary society has a fascination with technology and, perhaps most importantly: - the eroticism of virtual reality ... Any technology that claims to be able to get close to the experience of reality holds a powerful magic. James Gibson (respected perceptual psychologist) argued that it was not possible for a mediated reality to ever be confused with reality ... but the eroticism of the idea insists on trying to achieve this. In the field of VR the notion of presence is precisely defined as "the illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated" (Lombard)... exactly what Gibson says is not possible. I think it is this eroticism which fuels much of the efforts behind ambisonics. [As an aside, I believe that the notion of music within VR creates a tension .... where the magic of the music must compete with the magic of the illusion of reality. The only time when that tension is resolved is when ambisonics is used to record/capture musical performance] Etienne -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120401/325eaa1a/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
