sonic surrounds

There seem to be many ambisonic microphones popping up around the place - both high-end and mid-range commercial microphones, as well as home-built DIY microphones.

Here are some photos and links.
(all images’ copyright owned by their respective manufacturers).

The premier ambisonic microphone range by Soundfield is soon to include a (presumably cheaper) A-Format microphone, the SPS200 (pdf link).

AGM Digital are redeveloping their MR1, originally developed with Danish Pro Audio using matched B&K 4011 capsules.

Core Sound are about to release their TetraMic a-format ambisonic microphone.

On the DIY side:
In 2005, I made my own DIY ambisonic microphone using Panasonic electret capsules, which turned out to be great quality for a cost of around $300.

Also in 2005, Etienne Deleflie built his Sound Thief ambisonic microphone using Rode NT5 microphone parts (capsule and phantom preamps).

Earlier, Henry J. Walmsley had already built his own ambisonic microphone also using Panasonic capsules.

In late 2006, I heard of two more new DIY ambisonic mics:
Rafael Kassier’s mic built from Oktava capsules:

and Paul Doornbusch’s beautifully constructed DIY mic built with Transound capsules:

Probably you could find out about more diy ambi mics by joining the Sursound list.

here’s a screenshot of the Pd interface that I developed to perform for Electrofringe 2006.

click on the image for full sized version:

I made heavy use of the (now quite usable) Graph on Parent feature - so that I could instantiate abstraction subpatches that created each of those GUI blocks in the patch.

Blocks aren’t really well labeled in this screenshot, but from left to right, top to bottom, these are the abstractions I developed and used in the patch:

• on the first row:
• a timer (clock), so i know how long i’ve been playing
• a “heartbeat” synth i made which emits a nice low bass pulse
• then three instances of the same ambisonic audio file player (that plays back my 4 channel ambisonic field recordings, and decodes them to 5 channel surround format)
• a single instance of a stereo audio file player
• on the second row:
• two instances of my 5 channel granulator - based on an improved version of the stereo granulator i’ve released elsewhere on my website
• a surround glitch/pop generator based on filtered single sample impulses with controlled stochastic triggering and panning
• and on the final row:
• a CPU load meter
• DSP switch
• mixer for all the abstractions, grouped into foreground and background sounds
• and the 5 channel output and recorder - which was the last thing i implemented, and seemed unreliable, so i didn’t use it to record my performance live. i’ll record a version sometime soon.

Some photos of electrofringe 2006: Filastine, DJ Scotch Egg and Robin Fox’s Lazorrr show. (Click thumbnails for larger versions).

Time Lapse Family Photo (1976 - 2005)

idea: take daily self portrait. make some rules regarding the photo that will enable flexibility of location, lighting, camera gear, etc, so that the photo can be taken within a reasonably tight specification regardless of time or location, every single day… also make rule regarding the timing of the photo - e.g. at least 12 hours between photos, but not necessarily every day on the day. a rule for logging the photos should also be made. maybe also a rule for GPS logging? One year of photos at 25 fps gives you 14.6 seconds of video. 50 years of photos at 25fps gives you 730 seconds, or just over 12 minutes.
There is also the film Time Piece (1980 - 1981) by Tehching Hsieh, which I first saw at Camera Obscura film night curated by Daniel Heckenberg and Kier Smith at Lan Franchi’s in Sydney.

Not too long after seeing this, I had a minor bicycle accident where I grazed my hand, taking a large coin-sized chunk of skin off my palm. I took photos as regularly as possible while the wound was healing, and came up with 20 or 30 seconds of video, but unfortunately I lost the results due to a hard-drive crash.
other cool vaguely related links resulting from a quick google for time lapse video
Étienne-Jules Marey used photography to study human movement

Tommy’s Beard is a flash site where you can watch or control the timeline to see Tommy’s beard grow, and also turn his head using a slider.

update: Mark Reid sent me a link to Jonathon Keller’s daily photo project, where he has been taking a photo every day since he was 22 in 1998!  great work.  and yes, he tried making video of the photos, but it took too long to align his eyes as a focal point.  Maybe that task could be automated.

(via makezine blog)
The KHRONOS PROJECTOR
[a video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen]
by Alvaro Cassinelli,
with the support of Takahito Ito, Monica Bressaglia & Masatoshi Ishikawa.

- nicely interactive, blobby rather than linear, version of Daniel Crooks‘ timeslice technique (which itself is a visual analog of single stream granular synthesis)

very nice!