The original conception of the Grand Duchy of Ambisonia was that it was a fairy tale place where magic happens, where you could do fantasmagorical things with sound... but you couldn't bring all the magic back with you into this world. Furthermore, time is different there - you pop in through the portal in Dave Malham's cupboard, to do a quick bit of wiring, or software, or production... and when you popped out, days, weeks months had passed! - if you went in to have a two or three day stint, setting up a 16 speaker rig (that was a lot in those days), when you came out, the season had changed and everyone looked a bit older.
So, I agree that it's sometimes touted as a universal panacea, leading to inevitable disappointment. Strictly, it is a phantom image system. A phantom image is not physically the same as a real source. For moving perceivers especially, the distinction becomes clear very quickly - precedence effects and all that. So, for precise control of perceptual effect via phantom imagery, the listening circumstances have to be tightly controlled. If you want a sound to come from a particular place, no matter where the perceiver actually is, then it had better come from that place. However - there is a slight problem: for many sounds, a speaker sounds all to like, er, a speaker. Especially, if you're making the sound of a large 'thing' (which would have 'facingness' because of own-body occlusion) using a small point source device, it still doesn't quite do the trick - and of course, if you want it to move, well... Meanwhile, if you want to use ambisoncs as a soundfield projector system, where precise imagery is not the point (music festivals, clubs, museum ambience etc) the it's excellent for that - you can hear there's stuff all around, moving, near and far (to some extent), just not pinpoint images. For the latter, you'd probably combine ambisoncs with discrete speaker feeds (the 'speaker-ishness' of individual speakers is ameliorated when there's a lot going on - it's a cognitive thing that isn't really described in the literature) and /or VBAP Cheers ppl Dr. Peter Lennox School of Technology, Faculty of Arts, Design and Technology University of Derby, UK e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk t: 01332 593155 -----Original Message----- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Augustine Leudar Sent: 15 May 2013 15:28 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics I think the thing is people think that ambisonics is some incredible magic spatialisation technique that surpasses all others - yet is so complicated that nobody can understand it except for a few mega nerds and mathematicians that speak in mysterious riddles whenever you ask them anything and therefore this feat of incredible genius is doomed to commercial failure. This opinion it seems to me is help by people who havent had a lot of hands on experience actually using it in a proffesional context (ie actually producing film, theatre, sound design etc) - in fact thats what I originally thought about . A lot of people seem to equate ambisonics with "surround sound with height " as well (hands up I was guilty of that too once) . Basically if I was going to design a full 360 degree soundtrack for a film (which will probably not happen by the way - the last thing film producers want is people turning away from the screen and looking over their shoulder because a dog barked behin d them - roll on holospheres !) - the last thing I would use ambisonics for is point sources - ideally I would use an individual speaker in the right position as the point source, and failing that some sort of amplitude panning . I would use it for panning sometimes - and for some weird phase effects and a few other things , ideally you will mix ambisonics with other spatialisation techniques and then render your multichannel audio tracks. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20130515/eca0cdeb/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound _____________________________________________________________________ The University of Derby has a published policy regarding email and reserves the right to monitor email traffic. If you believe this email was sent to you in error, please notify the sender and delete this email. Please direct any concerns to info...@derby.ac.uk. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
