sonic surrounds

Short video of my home built DIY ambisonic microphone with home built DIY windshield recording 4 channel ambisonic surround audio on a small motor boat on the Hawkesbury River in Sydney Australia.

This video shows the view to the front of the boat, with the driver, then pans around to show the microphone and windshield mounted in the middle of the boat.

The sound on the video is straight from the Canon IXUS, so it’s pretty poor quality and shows the effect of the wind, which is blocked very well by the DIY windscreen on the ambisonic mic.

Here’s a binaural rendering of the ambisonic recording taken at the same time as this video - showing the effectiveness of the windscreen. Listen with headphones!

 hawkesbury_ambisonic_binaural [0:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I created a pd patch that uses a very simple gui of 2 buttons (start and stop) to record a version of Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”.

Get the Pd patch: sitting_in_a_room.pd

I see that Christopher Burns did the same thing in 2000 and evidence is here.

And an example of audio output from the patch, using just the key line from Lucier’s longer original text (yes, that’s why it’s sitting in a room for short attention span kids):

 i_am_sitting_in_a_room.mp3 [0:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download