sonic surrounds

The article below is copied directly from the Spatial Audio Research blog of the Quality and Usability Lab at TU Berlin in order to help spread the word on this toolbox.  The toolbox comes from the AABBA Project (aural assessment by means of binaural algorithms) [pdf], which was introduced by Jens Blauert at the 2009 International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research (ISAAR).
I’ve been using their Auditory Modelling Toolbox for the Lindemann analysis below, and found it to be very well developed.

July 26, 2010 in MATLAB by Hagen Wierstorf | No comments

A new version of the growing Auditory Modelling Toolbox has been released. The main new feature is a binaural model after Lindemann (1986a) that uses a running cross-correlation with inhibition to predict the perceived lateralization of an auditory event. The output of the model depends on the auditory filters and on the time (see figure below).

To install it, you can download it from Sourceforge. You also have to install the Linear Time/frequency Toolbox. Then in Matlab or Octave just go to the directories of the toolboxes and run:

>> ltfatstart
>> amtstart

After this you are able to use the Lindemann model, see help lindemann for an introduction. To produce the figure below, you can run:

>> demo_lindemann;

Another very nice feature is the function exp_lindemann1986a that is able to reproduce the figures of the Lindemann paper. For example to reproduce figure 6 of the paper, just type exp_lindemann('fig6'). The model is under further development and will include in the next release a version of the method proposed byGaik (1993) to identify natural combinations of ITDs and ILDs. Further a version of theBreebaart model will also be included in one of the next releases.

From Peter Mcilwain, via the ACMA mailing list, comes the following news of the Nodal composing tool.

Nodal has been released for OSX and now Windows. Its free and has attracted some interest in the computer music community. For those unfamiliar with Nodal: Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. The software is produced at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash University, Australia. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). The composer interactively defines the graph, which is then traversed by any number of virtual players that play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken by a player to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.