sonic surrounds

Today is the second day of the Ambisonics Symposium at IEM, Graz, Austria.
My poster and demonstration is on today, titled:
AmbiGrainer - A Higher Order Ambisonic Granulator in Pd

The paper is available in the online proceedings.

Below is a screenshot of the interface to the patch.  The patch set itself is presently available as a beta by request.

AmbiGrainer is a high quality granulation engine, with sub-block grain timings, capable of producing some very smooth sounds. Grains may be individually panned in 3rd order Ambisonics (with per-grain order specification). Grains may also be specified directly by an external algorithm, or at a meta-level using the provided GUI. A nice feature is the creation of an Ambisonic grain cloud of grains at randomised directions.  The system can run many thousands of grains per second, with 80 simultaneous voices running easily on a 2007 MacBook Pro.

BillaBoop is an awesome project by Amaury Hazan (also involved in the iPhone RjDj generative music project).

BillaBoop is a real-time audio driven drum controller which allows the user to control up to 3 drum instruments. The user can control any drum synth with the voice (beat box), or any object or musical instrument.

In other words, you can play a soft-synth on your computer by percussive playing with real physical objects - a pen on a jar or your fingers on a desk….  Watch the video below to see this in action.

What’s more, BillaBoop uses Machine Learning to enable the system to learn by demonstration.

I will definitely be trying this out when I get some more time on my hands.  I’ve always wanted to be able to capture little rhythms from tapping my fingers or playing the objects on my desk as I procrastinate or even listen to some other music on headphones….

BillaBoop is indicative of the present idea in the zeitgeist of audio control by sound analysis. Another fantastic sounding new example is Ableton Live 8’s groove features that can extract a groove from any audio or midi - and apply it to different audio. Two other examples of audio analysis controllers were seen recently on Johnny Chung Lee’s Procrastineering blog : Sensitive Object and Scratch Input.  Finally, another older favourite of mine: sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! (also see the great explanatory video on youtube).