sonic surrounds

Some more juicy sonic cherries picked from ICAD Day 2 …

Scott Brewer from the SIAL Sound Studio, RMIT, Melbourne, presented a poster, “CREATING A VIRTUAL SUIKINKUTSU”, describing the SuperCollider physically modeled synthesis of the Suikinkutsu - a Japanese garden feature that implements a below-ground chamber that resonates the sounds of water drips running off from a hand-wash bowl - kind of like a miniature of Jem Finer’s Score for a Hole in the Ground. Here’s a diagram (taken from a book by Morozumi) in Brewer’s paper:

K. Vogt presented a poster “SONIFICATION OF SPIN MODELS. LISTENING TO PHASE TRANSITIONS IN THE ISING AND POTTS MODEL.” which utilized two personal audio processing favourites of mine - spatialization and granulation to model particle spin theory. The result was burbley sound textures that morphed out of strongly pitched textures.

Peter Lennox (of University of Derby’s SPARG), in his paper with Tony Myatt, titled “CONCEPTS OF PERCEPTUAL SIGNIFICANCE FOR COMPOSITION AND REPRODUCTION OF EXPLORABLE SURROUND SOUND FIELDS”, mentioned the idea of cartoonification of spatial sound mixes - as a concept to economically increase the realism of virtual audio environments by focusing on creating the right *impression*, rather than painstakingly recreating exact features that may not be perceived for some reason, or that distract or diminish the desired impression. Of course, this cartoonification is exactly what film sound designers already do, though Lennox talks of taking this concept into the world of spatial sound rendering. He also made a strong argument for returning space to music, through applications such as spatial DJing - as a more sophisticated version of sound diffusion performance capability.

Another item from Day 1 that I forgot to mention in the previous post - the poster presentation titled “USER-SPECIFIC AUDIO RENDERING AND STEERABLE SOUND FOR DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS”, by Mike Wozniewski, Zack Settel and Jeremy R. Cooperstock.

This work created a 3d-game like graphical environment with visible objects that also represent auditory sources and sinks. The result is kind of like a cross between Second Life and Native Instruments’ Reaktor, or some other audio processing patcher software. The user can take a first-person or second-person perspective of a world that contains sounding objects, other users, and sound-modifying objects. For example, the demonstrator wore a microphone headset that fed audio into the environment (which itself contained virtual objects that generated spatial audio), and was able to effect his voice by aiming a wireframe, cone-shaped sound radiation pattern towards the effector objects - such as a flanger. Other sounding objects contained sound loops that could be similarly triggered by the viewer’s site lines. Overall, the environment enabled an enjoyable, playful collaborative, networked, immersive experimental audio experience. Nice work. Here’s a quote from the paper abstract:

We present a method for user-specific audio rendering of a virtual environment that is shared by multiple participants. … Spatialization of sound sources is accomplished via acoustic physical modelling, yet our approach also allows for localized signal processing within the scene. In order to control the flow of sound within the scene, the user has the ability to steer audio in specific directions. This paradigm leads to many novel applications where groups of individuals can share one continuous interactive sonic space.

And an image from the paper:

On a separate note, Somaya Langley has an ICAD photoset on her Flickr account (hopefully not censored!), including the photo below of a slide showing the geodesic head-cage for HRTF capture via reciprocity technique from a paper I mentioned on the previous post.