sonic surrounds

filmachine is a multichannel spatial audio & visual installation by artists Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami currently installed at the Podewils’sches Palais (ex Tesla) in Berlin, for Transmediale 2008. The description on the transmediale website goes as follows:

filmachine places the visitor inside a vortex of sound and light that transcends the traditional perspective of the cinematic experience. Three circles of loudspeakers are suspended from the ceiling above an abstract landscape. On entering the space, the visitor starts the composition with a button at the center of the piece, triggering an immersive audio-visual experience in a 3-dimensional soundscape, enhanced by a specially designed LED lighting system. For the exhibition in Berlin, Keiichiro Shibuya creates a new composition which is presented here as a world premiere.

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Philippe-Aubert Gauthier has published a useful classification of spatial sound reproduction technologies, based on a large bibliography and some early feedback.

His top level categories of classification are the paradigm of sound field simulation, being either physics-based (eg wavefield synthesis), or perception-based (examples range from stereophony to synthesis of fundamental binaural cues).

The categorisation is nicely lateral in its thinking, for example, including exterior soundfield simulation that might be used to synthesis instrument directivity patterns (although this section neglects to mention O-Format, a method analogous to B-Format Ambisonics for representing outward facing directivity patterns using spherical harmonics). Another omitted technology is Vector Based Ampitude Panning (VBAP), for synthesising interior sound fields, though it might be hard to categorise into either physics-based or perception-based.

That said, this website offers a good introduction to a way of thinking about spatial sound reproduction that is more expansive than many information sources.