One thing that crosses my mind is this:
It is rather important in thinking about this to separate
out the theory, the practical implementation , and
the consumer aspect, that is the presence in the market place.
The theory of Ambisonics in terms of physics is quite
old. It is really nineteenth century mathematics
(Helmholtz Kirchoff, spherical harmonics expansion etc.)
And WFS is even older in a sense, going back in effect
to Christen Huygens in the late 17th century.
It is important to realize this since otherwise one
runs the risk of being like the audio journalist who
was , when the Quad 63 came out, praising the genius of
Peter Walker for realizing that one could synthesize
a virutal point source from rings and time delays,
an idea that Huygens would have taken for obvious!
(The Quad 63 was a remarkable achievement but not for
that reason!)
Second, in the exploration of why Ambisonics did not
succeed commercially(yet), it seems to me important
to understand the whole nature of the success of technological
products. They succeed if they offer a lot but demand nothing
of the consumer mentally or next to nothing. Home computers
took off when one no longer had to program them. Believe me,
if people had to program in machine language in any sense,
or even in the DOS sense,
there would be no home computer industry on the current scale.
This is the essence of Apple's success--style and
something good happening but no effort needed AT ALL.
Ambisonics asked for a little thinking. No good commercially.
(There were other reasons of course, notable among them
that the people who do it do not really seem to care
much whether it succeeds commercially).
As to how to write a dissertation: Focus is the key. Too wide
ranging and one ends up with internet chitchat in academic
language.
For example, the single topic of the history and sociology of how the UK
went for one point miking and the USA went for spaced microphones
and the consequences of that choice would already be enough for a
good dissertation if one really went into it.
There is a vast literature, and there are still people around
who could be interviewed on the history of the subject and so on. This
could be a really interesting subject to study in depth, culminating
in how the UK Blunlein axis ended up with Ambisonics and
the USA spaced mike axis (the Bell Labs crowd) ended up with 5.1 and Dolby
surround.
Social history would be good! Recorded interviews with the
major players--too bad so many are dead. But they are not
all dead, and there are many who have memories
of people who knew them. Look for people who knew
Blumlein, talk to Roy Allison about the power response
diffuse field approach to home audio, and so on. This
would be one possibility. And it would be a really interesting
thing to read. Talk to people who worked on Ambsisonics early
about what really happened. Oral history!
This would be worth MUCH MORE than a general unfocused
discussion from secondary sources.
FOCUS is the key. Good disserations are detailed investigations
into narrow topics. General impressions can be turned up
on line in an hour or two and moreover lots of people have them. What is
interesting in scholarship is DEPTH and FOCUS and PRECISION and DETAIL.
Oral history is the thing to go for. Forget explanations and try to
get the facts of what happened. Explanations can come after the
facts are entirely clear.
Robert
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