I'll be interested to hear about your progress. In the back of my garage, I have a zero-latency 8-way 1st order encode-decode device (it even has a 4-way 1st order feed for subs). It's wholly analogue, and we used it in Ambisonix Dance nights in the 90's. The 4 outputs of an analogue desk passed into 4 inputs which were encoded as front-left, front right, back-right, back left. Movement was crudely achieved by simply cross fading across the buses in the desk. Additionally, a through-route for B-format recordings (or indeed, the output from a computer that was encoding to b-format) passed into the decode section of the device. The device looks like some monstrous breadboard from Baron Von Frankenstein's lab, bodged into an ex military 19" rack mount (so you could stand an elephant on it, if need be- though we never called on this particular facility). I think it might not pass PAT criteria today.
If such a device seems rather crude and a world away from HOA - well, it was. On the other hand, it never crashed. But an interesting point - I never heard a club-goer complain about the lack of precision of phantom imagery - focus, ensemble depth, apparent source width, any of those things. It wasn't for electroacoustic concerts, or virtual reality. Years later, I had a student, Caryl Jones, carry out a study on potential DJ tools for ambisonics. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she found many of the more subtle effects possible in ambisonics were wasted -and too cumbersome to operate in real time by the DJ (even when she tracked down the hardcore of intelligent DJs who wanted to experiment). Instead, simple to operate and with maximum possible perceptual changes seemed to be the order of the day - and most importantly, stuff that had (or could have) a 'musical reason for existing' in the club context. Finally, in a series of experiments at the Glade festival, with Tony and John of Funktion One, my collegue (Bruce Wiggins) and I experimented in that context with a system that used F1's 1st order analogue encode-decode chain, and Bruce's (2rd order)software chain, operating in parallel into the 8 channel speaker array - again with a 4-way sub arrangement. That was when we first heard John Leonard's "when geese go bad" recording over a 40kW rig - result: Dinosaur-size geese. And in sound testing, the motorbike recordings (from Soundfield's website) drove the council guys with their sound level measuring gear bonkers - they couldn't work out where the lunatic on the bike was. The flypast of the spitfires wasn't bad, too. So, I'm saying that a solution that allows parallel processing, so that some things can be quick-and-dirty, whilst others can be precise-but-complex, might suit your needs? Regards 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 [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Jake Williams Sent: 16 September 2014 22:17 To: Sursound@music.vt.edu Subject: [Sursound] Low-latency, ultra-stable Ambisonics for club install? Hello everyone! I thought after the obligatory period of lurking and digging I'd raise my head and say hello - and hopefully canvas some opinions from your wealth of experience here. I met a few of you earlier in the year at the iX Symposium in Montreal (I was doing the music for the live, improvised full-dome / Ambisonic AV show Fragments). Though I have worked on multi-channel pieces before, Fragments was my first foray into Ambisonics and since then I have been rather obsessed (although my grasp of the science is still a little shaky). Anyways, to cut to the chase - I am now working on designing some effects for a nightclub install - the idea being that there will be a subtle spatialisation of the DJ FX over the 8 speakers using, hopefully, Ambisonics. Basically I am researching the best way to do this. For Fragments I used Ableton going into the ICST externals in MaxMSP, but I can't get the latency low enough for a realtime, live signal without glitching and instability (the audio was all inside Ableton for the show, so a high buffer size was possible). The producers of the project are keen not to use standard home computers, so I am looking for a rock-solid, very low latency solution. What are your guys thoughts? From digging in the archives (admittedly only as far back as 2011) I have identified some different possibilities - 1. Ambdec on something running Linux 2. HOA on something running PureData (maybe Linux again?) 3. Ambi-X on Reaper (though this is only PC or Mac?) 3. Some sort of bespoke microprocessor solution, maybe based on Ambisonic Equivalent Panning? 4. Some sort of control over VCA faders in a quasi-analogue solution (though I have seen posts about this where you guys are not keen :-) 5. Has anyone run Ambisonics on a Kyma system?? We will be feeding live FX sends into the system to be spatialised in some preset patterns in it's basic operational mode.. it will of course be customisable for bespoke shows. Anyways if any of you have any input I would be very grateful :-) Cheers Jake Jake Williams +44 7932 645145 http://www.jakeone.co.uk http://www.fragmentsav.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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