Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Hi Richard, As we announced at the conference, Ambisonia is well on the way to being resurrected, thanks to the efforts of Oli Larkin, Marc Lavallée and Ettienne Deleflie. There's lots of fiddly details and housekeeping to finish off, but...RSN Dave On 14/04/2012 10:31, Richard Lee wrote: PS The most immediate need at the moment, and it is crucial, is to re-surrect Ambisonia.com. Otherwise, the best evidence that Ambi is worth pursuing goes down the drain. GV Malham, I hope you have this in hand before you hang up your pointy hat. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Musichttp://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448*/ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450*/ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /*http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 14 Apr 2012, at 16:47, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works. No, it didn't work. That's just a plain lie. Obviously I can listen to a UHJ encoded CD or radio transmission as regular stereo, and if I have the equipment/software, I can also decode it into surround. It works, I've heard it, I have the UHJ CDs that I can (and often have to) play back as stereo. UHJ will (mostly) be heard as plain stereo, So what? That's the entire point. Selling UHJ encoded material requires hardly a change in the distribution channel, and requires no change at all for the consumer, unless they want to explore the surround sound feature. Anthony, this is my point: UHJ didn't work for distribution of surround music. No change at all doesn't give you surround at home. Unless they want to explore is exactly what didn't work out, and then people might want to explore some real surround. How many people have an UHJ decoder? How many people have Dolby Surround decoders? (I mean the old form, not the discrete one...) Best Stefan Schreiber ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: and then there might be a few issues. (Mathematically-logically, it is impossible to press 3 channels into 2. You will have some artefacts if presenting surround sound in just 2-channels.) The artefacts are not significant. They are certainly less of an issue than all the artefacts that arise from lossy compression, and people by and large don't care or notice either. Artefacts are probably bigger than from lossy compression (which one? AAC?). People don't care: I do, and don't underestimate your customers anyway. Best, Stefan Schreiber ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: Did I say anything different? The thing is FOA sounds just fine with 4 speakers, and 4 decent speakers are a lot more affordable than 6, 8, or more decent speakers. The way the world economy is going (stagnant wages combined with inflation in the rich countries, and rising wages in poor countries, which means global income averaging), people will in inflation adjusted terms have less disposable income for tech gadgetry in the rich countries, and may be barely get to the point where they can afford entry-level systems in the poor countries. But you bought all the Apple stuff, not me... :-) You don't buy speakers very often, this is a typical long-term buy. If you don't have any surround market (unless for home theater), typical audio equipment companies won't sell a lot of speakers. If I talk about Germany or Britain, some people certainly could and would spend more on typical hi fi (now: surround) stuff if there would be a market at all, which isn't. (The world economy is actually growing, so your argument doesn't convince me.) That means stereo systems will already be considered expensive, and something that requires four speakers will start to push the pain envelope. Forget 6 or 8 speaker setups, these are a luxury for an upper crust of high-income or high-networth people, and they won't sustain a mass market. Currently nobody as 8 speaker setups because there is no music around. It is not necessarily about luxury products, because even the richtest customers can't listen to enough recordings. Secondly, good speakers don't have to be so expensive as they tell you in the local hi fi shop. And thirdly, you will buy less times speakers in your life than iPhones/Android phones... Best, Stefan Schreiber ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
The solution to establish any mass market for surround would be obviously to look into better playback via headphones. (binaural, 5.1, FOA, .AMB, etc.) Listening via (4-x) speakers at home would be higher en. Motion-compensated playback is possible nowadays. Many devices have motion sensors. (I personally believe that motion-compenation has to be included into the surround via headphone approach.) Mark: I dislike this case closed rhetorics, it is just your opinion. We know that the music industry has missed many boats, but maybe you also had one or two wrong predictions in your recent life? Best, Stefan newme...@aol.com wrote: Folks: ALL reproduced music is a special effect -- if you wish to hear a performance, as it was actually played, go to the performance. MONO is a special effect. STEREO is a special effect. SURROUND is a special effect. MP3 is a special effect. None of them is a live performance. And, no amount of money spent by audiophiles can change that. Neither can a few extremely well-executed recordings. It will always be a special effect and everyone knows it. Starting In the 1960s, the *stereo* special effect beat out the *mono* special effect for the reproduction of music. A lot of people *made* a lot of money as a new mass-market was generated, culminating in the CD (followed by MP3 etc.) Beginning in the 1990s, the music industry tried to promote the *surround* (i.e. 5.1 style) special effect -- driven by the installed base of home theaters and DVD players, along with a preceived need to recapture the revenues being lost in CD sales (due to the MP3 special effect). They *spent* a lot of money, tried various technologies, and they failed. The consumer did not believe that it was good enough (i.e. compared to the stereo special effect) to make the switch. No one is going to try that again. Furthermore, as music reproduction shifted to MP3-based online delivery and ear-bud reproduction (i.e. another version of the stereo special effect) -- the idea of pretending that all this isn't a *special effect* by trying to get absolute sound in your living-room just seemed more ridiculous than ever. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. By the 1990s, the ground of our experience had shifted from the acoustic/electric to the tactile/digital and we were freed to do whatever we wanted with sound. People playing with Ambisonics was the result. But our personal interests no longer intersect with the now obsolete efforts to generate mass-markets around new sonic special effects. Lou Reed can play around all he wants. It will not create a new mass-market for a new special effect. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/10ced087/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [OT] Spatial music
This is getting rather off-topic, but... On 15 Apr 2012, at 23:02, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: This is very unlikely to be true, that one can justify getting a new TV to save electricity for the sake of the world. To save on your own bills will also take a very long time. People seldom do the arithmetic on this. When the first gas crisis occurred(in the 1970s) I did some calculation of how long it would take to recoup the purchase price of getting a more fuel-efficient car. After that, I kept right on driving the car I had--it was going to take forever in terms of the lives of cars. This is a matter of degree. It's also a matter of ecology vs. economy. There are many things that are cheaper, but not environmentally sound, which is also one of the problems with greenhouse gas emission trading: it's in some cases profitable to generate bad stuff, then destroy it, and then sell the so obtained emission credits, than not generating the bad stuff in the first place. So obviously, since the production and disposal/recycling of a product has an energy and carbon footprint, too, it would be foolish to throw out a brand new CRT and replace it with a LED TV to save the planet. On the other hand, if you have an aging CRT, that eventually you plan to replace, then when to do this can very well be based on energy cost, particularly if indirect energy consumption is taken into account, too. And of course, it depends how much TV you watch. If all you do is watch the evening news, then there's little point. If you have a waiting room, and the TV runs from 7:30 till midnight uninterrupted, it's a different story. So it's a matter of degree and math, whereby the almighty $ doesn't necessarily reveal what is the most ecologically sound moment to switch devices, only when it's the most economical moment, and the two, unfortunately, are not congruent. Saving energy is good. Stop having children--that is where the real energy and carbon footprint is. True, although that's generally not a problem in 1st world countries where populations only remain stable through immigration, and otherwise would be declining. Anyway, this is taking quite a detour, because all I was saying that there are other considerations, besides the lower amount of space taken up by a flat screen TV that make people switch, among them picture quality and energy consumption. So I didn't single out the latter, just pointed out that these two are additional factors besides less space, and a more fashionable look of the device. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Paul Hodges wrote: --On 13 April 2012 03:08 +0100 Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: I am not sure that any form of surround will make it into the home, I have quite a lot of commercial surround music recordings, on 5.1 media. However, because of my recording activities, my surround reproduction equipment is tied to my computer, and the SACD media containing these surround recordings is specifically designed to be not playable on my computer, or transferable to it - so I have heard hardly any of these. I can decode and play my even larger number of UHJ recordings (from Nimbus, of course, but also others), but even setting that up is a pain to do because of the lack of integrated software UHJ players. I have criticized this again and again, also at companies: SACDs are fine, but they are not compatible with computers and the current crop of mobile devices. UHJ should be supported on any Ambisonics decoder, such as FOA. Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. This is a very valid question...;-) Best, Stefan ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works. No, it didn't work. UHJ will (mostly) be heard as plain stereo, and then there might be a few issues. (Mathematically-logically, it is impossible to press 3 channels into 2. You will have some artefacts if presenting surround sound in just 2-channels.) Surround reproduction requires more than 2 speakers, say: at least 4. (Even decoded UHJ, so to speak.) If speakers are crappy, surround won't be enjoyable with any system. :-) Best, Stefan ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: So who cares about bandwidth and storage? But even if these other issues were moot, bandwidth and storage remain at a premium, because my iPad holds only 64GB, and the iPhone's music download over 3G or 4G has a rather hefty price tag. Yes, but your next iPad will hold 256GB (for example), and if Apple doesn't want to offer this somebody else will do. But for mere interest: How do you listen to surround on your iPad? Cos this question has to be asked, sorry for my ignorance.:-D You can listen to UHJ. But as stereo. See former posting. Best, Stefan Schreiber P.S.: Surround reproduction is not related in any form to cheap hard drives () vs. SSD storage. I am actually tired of reading this stuff about cheap, crappy speakers, cheap hard drives etc. Nice rhetorical attempt, but what is the aim of that? ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Robert Greene wrote: I was not objecting to high order for production. But it is never going to fly in playback terms. Everyone takes for granted (I assume) that people can and often do things to make recordings that do not happen at the playback end. (How many consumers know Protools?) That was hardly the point. What seems to have emerged from this long discussion is that Ambisonics is really not going to be much use as a consumer format--or perhaps more precisely, that rather few people here are interested in making it of much use as a consumer format. I think this is a shame, because I was under the impression(and still am) that it makes for rather nice playback. Robert Future consumer formats will be file-based, computer-decodable. If so, there is more opportunity for several surround formats existing next to each other. (5.1 has to be included into the bigger framework.) I mean, you have to decode AVC and HEVC (successor standard for video compression, nearly finished), and you have to decode a movie which is presented in some container format. (sound, menus, synchronization...) Mobile smart devices are not PCs, but obviously computers. Best, Stefan Schreiber ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Hi, Generally I totally agree with Ronald C.F. Antony and Robert Greene. Ambisonics is useful and pleasing, even at first order. Until that gets out of the starting blocks into more widespread use it will remain a minority pursuit. I think all on this list would agree that this is undesirable. It is scalable, and first base is first order. As Ronald says we need to make it widely hearable and available for people at all levels to use. Anyone who takes care to set up home cinema, home studio monitoring or public address systems effectively can understand the basics, and these can easily be promulgated. This would promote more widespread use and content creation. This doesn't stop anyone with the interest and budget exploring and using higher orders. There have been suggestions of using higher order ambisonics as a production format, with UHJ or first order as a distribution format. This could be regarded as unnecessary. The Soundfield microphone has a fairly large user base, and higher order microphones are unlikely to be widely available and used for some time. Other than such direct recording nearly all productions are going to involve panning of mono and stereo sources, and possibly mixing them with Soundfield mic recordings or even 5.1 (etc.) recordings. As these productions are nearly all done with DAWs now, it is the scene description (direction, distance, width etc.) of each source that is important and already future proof. This can be applied subsequently to any spatial audio algorithm, ambisonics to any order, WFS, VBAP, zillion.1, Delay/Amplitude panning etc. Any software or plug-in that we use now may not be useable in five years time, and may have been replaced with something else. Any finished material will survive and hopefully be playable. A scene description could survive, or could be recreated by careful listening, much as old multi-track recordings can be remixed and polished up now. Ciao, Dave Hunt ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 14 Apr 2012, at 16:47, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works. No, it didn't work. That's just a plain lie. Obviously I can listen to a UHJ encoded CD or radio transmission as regular stereo, and if I have the equipment/software, I can also decode it into surround. It works, I've heard it, I have the UHJ CDs that I can (and often have to) play back as stereo. UHJ will (mostly) be heard as plain stereo, So what? That's the entire point. Selling UHJ encoded material requires hardly a change in the distribution channel, and requires no change at all for the consumer, unless they want to explore the surround sound feature. The latter is something people can explore at their leisure, as time and budget and equipment allow. But there's never a choice to make about which track to buy, which track to sync, what information to strip out to reduce size. There are also no choices about which versions of a track to produce, which versions to bundle, etc. because there's always only one mix, and one product, it only can be listened to in different ways. This is the path that provides the least options, meaning the least confusion and the least overhead; and that's always the winning path in any business that's consumer oriented. This is NOT an engineering or technical product, nor is it a professional product, where people might like and want options and choices. and then there might be a few issues. (Mathematically-logically, it is impossible to press 3 channels into 2. You will have some artefacts if presenting surround sound in just 2-channels.) The artefacts are not significant. They are certainly less of an issue than all the artefacts that arise from lossy compression, and people by and large don't care or notice either. Surround reproduction requires more than 2 speakers, say: at least 4. (Even decoded UHJ, so to speak.) And? Did I ever say anything different? If speakers are crappy, surround won't be enjoyable with any system. :-) Did I say anything different? The thing is FOA sounds just fine with 4 speakers, and 4 decent speakers are a lot more affordable than 6, 8, or more decent speakers. The way the world economy is going (stagnant wages combined with inflation in the rich countries, and rising wages in poor countries, which means global income averaging), people will in inflation adjusted terms have less disposable income for tech gadgetry in the rich countries, and may be barely get to the point where they can afford entry-level systems in the poor countries. That means stereo systems will already be considered expensive, and something that requires four speakers will start to push the pain envelope. Forget 6 or 8 speaker setups, these are a luxury for an upper crust of high-income or high-networth people, and they won't sustain a mass market. On 14 Apr 2012, at 16:58, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: So who cares about bandwidth and storage? But even if these other issues were moot, bandwidth and storage remain at a premium, because my iPad holds only 64GB, and the iPhone's music download over 3G or 4G has a rather hefty price tag. Yes, but your next iPad will hold 256GB (for example), and if Apple doesn't want to offer this somebody else will do. That doesn't make the cost much lower. SSD prices, although they have come down quite a bit, are still prohibitively expensive for large capacities. A 480GB SSD still costs well over $1k, a 480GB disk drive you can get for $50. That's a factor of 20, and it's not going to go away that quickly. Besides, bandwidth is a separate issue: a lousy 2GB data allowance costs $30 or more in the US. In Austria, where mobile data is globally speaking dirt cheap, 1GB is about €1 when bought in bulk, but even so, transmitting large sound files would cost as much to transfer as the purchase price of a track would end up being in e.g. the iTunes store. So for mobile devices, bandwidth costs matter greatly. But for mere interest: How do you listen to surround on your iPad? Cos this question has to be asked, sorry for my ignorance.:-D Binaural decoding would be the way to go. Besides, the iPad ends up in the dock when at home, which is hooked up to the power amp. An iPad with amp is a complete entertainment system, for those who haven't noticed that fact. What is missing is software, and that's why convincing companies like Apple to get
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
can a tetrahedral mic be used to create a room (correction) impulse response in B format? and how? Yes. I can make a sensible attempt today for an Ambi rig spaced away from the walls as the HiFi pundits and other gurus have mandated for years. This however has near zero Wife Acceptance Factor. What i can't figure out is how to EQ for speakers mounted on or close to a wall. (Unless the speakers have been designed to work well in such positions. eg from the Unobtainium Speaker Co.) This is necessary to move towards Jeff's integrate in-wall loudspeakers at pre-specified locations (including ceiling) except the Supa Ambi Decoder doesn't need pre-specified locations. It measures the speaker positions using the TetraMike. I think Angelo has tried the 1st method using some naive strategies; just EQing WXYZ to get matching WXYZ from a Soundfield. This doesn't give very good results cos in speaker / room EQ, what you DON'T EQ is probably more important than what you do. Perhaps Fons knows more. You need some strategy like what's used in Dennis' Digital Room Correction but taking into account multiple speakers and B-format. I'd dearly love details of what Trinnov do. If I ever get to grips with 21st century programming tools, I intend to do some work on this so expect results before the end of the millenium. ___ Mark, please don't ignore my question about HSD 3D systems. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
--On 13 April 2012 03:08 +0100 Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: I am not sure that any form of surround will make it into the home, I have quite a lot of commercial surround music recordings, on 5.1 media. However, because of my recording activities, my surround reproduction equipment is tied to my computer, and the SACD media containing these surround recordings is specifically designed to be not playable on my computer, or transferable to it - so I have heard hardly any of these. I can decode and play my even larger number of UHJ recordings (from Nimbus, of course, but also others), but even setting that up is a pain to do because of the lack of integrated software UHJ players. Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. Paul -- Paul Hodges ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Me for one. Steve On 13 Apr 2012, at 08:37, Paul Hodges wrote: Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. Paul ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 09:07, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 04/13/2012 03:49 AM, Robert Greene wrote: While the mode of expression is even more emphatic than my own, RCFA is to my mind right all up and down the line. Talking about 3rd order is just castles in the air. As a theoretical mathematician, I spend most of my life building castles in the air. But one ought to know that that is what they are! you know, for every email you guys write about this tired old topic, i have _set up_ and _calibrated_ a higher order ambisonic system, and believe me, that's way more exciting. can you please stick your heads out the window eventually? it's 2012, bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, storage even more so [1]. there is absolutely no valid argument to be made against very high orders indeed for production and archival. That's not the point (well, at least, not mine). Out of the many choices available, which type of HOA system have you set up? What decided you on that choice rather than another? And which Higher Order would you choose as standard out of the many possibilities available? The closest to a consensus I have seen is third-order horizontal with second or even first-order height. For production and archival etc, should it be a free-for-all (= order creep), or would it be constructive to settle on one specific order (hybrid or otherwise) which everyone agrees to use as standard? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 03:08, Stefan Schreiber wrote: .. If you promote G format, 99% would see and listen to this as a 5.1 surround file. (An 99% would listen to an UHJ as a stereo file, cos there are really very few decoders around. In fact, 5.1 seems to be way more mainstream than decoded UHJ.) Part of the issue seems to be that people want it to be known that this or that soundtrack or album uses Ambisonics. Without that piece of information, all 5.1 tracks are simply understood as 5.1 tracks, and the sound may be in some unspecified way better or worse than expected. This must be something of a dilemma - B-Format (and G-format) may well be the best example of art that conceals art. In just the same way that people geneally have no idea of the techniques used to record something - single-point, multi, or whatever. The engineer knows, and that is enough. And hope for a good review. Or... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13 Apr 2012, at 04:08, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: Steven Dive wrote: IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't clearly worth promoting along with up to 3rd order G-format decodes for 5.1/7.1 setups for home users. Basically, get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get on with full 1st and higher orders. Steve Steve, Anthony: In which sense is UHJ and superstereo a viable alternative to 5.1 surround, if 5.1 is clearly better than any 2-channel system can be? Because it's NOT better. 99.9% of 5.1 mixes SUCK because they are pan-pot BS. 0.1% maybe use Ambisonic panning to do the mix, and they may be great, provided your setup is matching exactly the setup for which it is pre-decoded, at which point it is barely better than UHJ, shedding some matrixing constraints, while adding issues of irregular speaker arrays. Chances are, a 5.1 surround mix is a 4.0 in reality, using only 5.1 distribution. Further, as I said, 90%+ of 5.1 installations are not suitable for music playback anyway, because of the fact that the speakers are neither full-range, nor even matching in tone coloration. Without excessive room EQ and speaker compensation, phase is all over the place, and any moving sound changes character as it goes from front speakers to side or rear speakers, because they are typically different and cheaper speaker models. None of that matters for a bit of sci-fi whoosh or action flick shooting, it's however useless for music. So as far as my experience goes, the assertion that 5.1 is better than UHJ Stereo or 4.0 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics is plain wrong. You should introduce something which exceeds the existing solutions, not going back to something which fits into the stereo distribution chain. We already had this. Because that's still the only thing we have, the stereo distribution chain. A new technology needs to get the foot into the door. Nobody is going to make a speculative investment costing massive amounts of money, for an unproven, no-demand system. The only way to get it in the door is through guerilla tactics. Quality doesn't matter, convenience and simplicity do. Why do you think MP3 trounced AAC, which in turn trounced CD sales, which again are leaps and bounds above DVD-Audio and SACD? Only AFTER surround music is common can one address quality issues, just like only after online music was established, slowly the cries for better quality were raised, and the bit rates went up, and DRM was removed. According to your line reasoning, online music distribution cannot possibly be successful until it's lossless audio without DRM, but the reality was different. People bought lousy 128kbit/s compressed files encumbered with DRM, over better quality and DRM-free CDs, because it was SIMPLE and CONVENIENT. UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works. I have written that you could decode a 3rd order .AMB file on a 4 or 6 speaker home installation, for example ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order components. 8 speakers would be even better, but less is still possible. And I have said that none of that matters, because no musician in the world, except some esoteric avant guard musicians with a cumulative audience smaller than the number of members on this list is going to go through the cost and trouble of doing HOA productions. The only Ambisonic productions you're going to see are the ones that Tony Fatso Miller (and similarly unknown people) can do in their basement studios for some garage band that scratched together $500 to finally get a professional demo CD made. That sort of production is where the vast majority of music originates. Even if you go up three notches, do you really think the producer of Madonna's MDNA album has the slightest clue about HOA? You might be able to get such industry people to toy around with one extra channel and go from a LR or MS setup to a XYW setup, provided they can ship regular CDs that sell millions of copies. If they can mention in the liner notes, that as a special bonus it is surround encoded for playback on systems capable for that, then that's an added bonus, and that's ALL you're going to get until 100 million people or more have Ambisonic setups at home and ask for more. It is exactly these things, where e.g. some hard core Madonna fan would want to hear the album the way it was meant to be heard that will get people to buy a decent 4.0 setup, and spread the word. Nobody is going to have 6 or 8 speakers in the house,
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13 Apr 2012, at 10:07, Jörn Nettingsmeier netti...@stackingdwarves.net wrote: On 04/13/2012 03:49 AM, Robert Greene wrote: While the mode of expression is even more emphatic than my own, RCFA is to my mind right all up and down the line. Talking about 3rd order is just castles in the air. As a theoretical mathematician, I spend most of my life building castles in the air. But one ought to know that that is what they are! you know, for every email you guys write about this tired old topic, i have _set up_ and _calibrated_ a higher order ambisonic system, and believe me, that's way more exciting. Exciting in the same way as people spending massive amounts of money on speaker wire and listening to the same recording over and over to decide if the CD player sounds better with a magic brick on top, or without can you please stick your heads out the window eventually? it's 2012, bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, storage even more so [1]. there is absolutely no valid argument to be made against very high orders indeed for production and archival. get it in your heads that there is a difference between what the consumer uses and what the production format is. this is what ambisonics is all about: scalability. you get to keep your meridians and your four quad speakers, and everyone can just live happily ever after. None of that matters: - there are globally speaking between zero and none studios that even understand the concept of higher order ambisonics - there are between zero and no artists who ask for their works to be produced in HOA - there are between zero and none record labels that will pay the extra expense for a HOA production. So who cares about bandwidth and storage? But even if these other issues were moot, bandwidth and storage remain at a premium, because my iPad holds only 64GB, and the iPhone's music download over 3G or 4G has a rather hefty price tag. The reality of music, in 2012, isn't a desktop computer with cheap hard drives attached to it, that's so 90s, its a wireless, low-power portable device with expensive SSD storage and expensive always-connected wireless networking. So yes, even despite all the other cost factors and hurdles that speak against a system of the complexity of HOA, bandwidth and storage still matter, or should I say, matter again? Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
As my 'studio' is my spare room in our flat, I have decent set up where I can use the surround set-up, which Ronald will be pleased to know uses five matched loudspeakers, an LFE unit and has proper bass management, to listen for both work and pleasure. I play my SACD recordings on an inexpensive Pioneer unit that plays almost anything, has six separate outputs and is hooked up to a Metric Halo ULN-8. My wife has the same unit, used as a CD player, hooked up to a Yamaha receiver that has six separate inputs and outputs, although we don't have a surround system in the living-room. (Too full of 'cellos and house-plants) A long time ago, I asked how many people on this list actually had any sort of surround systems, let alone properly set-up home-cinema 5.1 systems, in their homes and I think about three people said they did. I wonder how many there are now? Regards, John On 13 Apr 2012, at 08:37, Paul Hodges wrote: Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
At 02:37 13/04/2012, Paul Hodges wrote: Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. I try to do this; but it is not always easy. The most friendly media are DVD-A and SACD which have a good enough bit rate. These I can play and enjoy. Playing wavefiles, which is what I would like to do, while relatively easy for two-channel stereo, is for me a PITA for ambisonics. Someone suggested using an Oppo BDP-95 for this, but then I heard that it will only play one wavefile and stop, thus one wavefile per track (movement) is a pain: even an LP will play four movements of a Mozart symphony without stopping. David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I disagree with this. I suppose for some things like pop vocals that do not have a natural acoustic venue surrounding them, surround is not helpful. But for large scaled acoustic music like orchestral music(which of course some people here would dismiss as a niche market) it really does help generate a better facsimile of the real experience. The problem is that practically none of the commercial material available does it right. But anyone who knows anything about acoustics knows that the concert experience of orchestral music has a very large amount of diffuse field sound involved--in energy terms, there is more diffuse field than direct arrival at most audience locations, quite a lot more. The precidence effect to some extent conceals this fact from people who listen superficially. But the reality is that stereo presentation of orchestral music is very much wrong. It can be pleasing, even beautiful, but it is always wrong. Surround can be right, or closer to right. But it usually is not, actually, as it is currently practiced. In most cases, you would be better off to take a stereo recording and make it into surround yourself. Quite disappointing situation, actually. But then people in contemporary High End audio do not seem to want to think about how music actually works in concert. It is not that the information is not available. I wrote this http://www.regonaudio.com/Records%20and%20Reality.html more than twenty-five years ago in The Absolute Sound. But not very many people seemed to understand the essential message--that a LOT of what you hear in concert ie diffuse field reverberation. People should have been trying to figure out how to generate that effect at home all along, but they mostly were not. And they still are not. They are worrying about other things entirely. Robert On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Wrong. They would want it, if they ever heard it. Sorry. I've heard surround and it's just not good enough to matter -- for MUSIC. I've heard Dark Side and I've heard Kind of Blue . . . and most of the rest of the SACD and DVD-A releases. Some are fabulous, some are not but none of it was enough. Good try. Experiment failed. I've recorded with Tetramics and I've set up an HSD 3D system, on which I enjoyed the 3RD DIMENSION of music -- height -- but none of this is enough. Amibsonics (i.e. FOA) is fabulous for AMBIENCE but, alas, not for MUSIC (due to the lack of frontal emphasis) and c'mon . . . we all know it. The reason why Ambisonics hasn't succeeded -- after all this time -- for MUSIC is that it's not *good* enough to make a difference. That's why the HOA debates happened. Smart people with well-trained ears KNOW that FOA isn't good enough. It has nothing to do with MAG or the British government or bad timing or bad business decisions -- it doesn't *improve* the listening to MUSIC enough for people to care. Seems that Apple also figured that out. I also know many people in the music *business* and they also heard it (indeed, spent a lot of money on it) and have universally come to the same conclusion. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/bb8fc69a/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
folks i just looked out of my window and it is 1975! Wireless World gave up waiting for the third part of MAG's article and started publishing somebody called Ivor Catt, who wanted to fight Maxwell in single combat. umashankar i have published my poems. read (or buy) at http://stores.lulu.com/umashankar Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:40:31 -0700 From: gre...@math.ucla.edu To: sursound@music.vt.edu Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music I disagree with this. I suppose for some things like pop vocals that do not have a natural acoustic venue surrounding them, surround is not helpful. But for large scaled acoustic music like orchestral music(which of course some people here would dismiss as a niche market) it really does help generate a better facsimile of the real experience. The problem is that practically none of the commercial material available does it right. But anyone who knows anything about acoustics knows that the concert experience of orchestral music has a very large amount of diffuse field sound involved--in energy terms, there is more diffuse field than direct arrival at most audience locations, quite a lot more. The precidence effect to some extent conceals this fact from people who listen superficially. But the reality is that stereo presentation of orchestral music is very much wrong. It can be pleasing, even beautiful, but it is always wrong. Surround can be right, or closer to right. But it usually is not, actually, as it is currently practiced. In most cases, you would be better off to take a stereo recording and make it into surround yourself. Quite disappointing situation, actually. But then people in contemporary High End audio do not seem to want to think about how music actually works in concert. It is not that the information is not available. I wrote this http://www.regonaudio.com/Records%20and%20Reality.html more than twenty-five years ago in The Absolute Sound. But not very many people seemed to understand the essential message--that a LOT of what you hear in concert ie diffuse field reverberation. People should have been trying to figure out how to generate that effect at home all along, but they mostly were not. And they still are not. They are worrying about other things entirely. Robert On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Wrong. They would want it, if they ever heard it. Sorry. I've heard surround and it's just not good enough to matter -- for MUSIC. I've heard Dark Side and I've heard Kind of Blue . . . and most of the rest of the SACD and DVD-A releases. Some are fabulous, some are not but none of it was enough. Good try. Experiment failed. I've recorded with Tetramics and I've set up an HSD 3D system, on which I enjoyed the 3RD DIMENSION of music -- height -- but none of this is enough. Amibsonics (i.e. FOA) is fabulous for AMBIENCE but, alas, not for MUSIC (due to the lack of frontal emphasis) and c'mon . . . we all know it. The reason why Ambisonics hasn't succeeded -- after all this time -- for MUSIC is that it's not *good* enough to make a difference. That's why the HOA debates happened. Smart people with well-trained ears KNOW that FOA isn't good enough. It has nothing to do with MAG or the British government or bad timing or bad business decisions -- it doesn't *improve* the listening to MUSIC enough for people to care. Seems that Apple also figured that out. I also know many people in the music *business* and they also heard it (indeed, spent a lot of money on it) and have universally come to the same conclusion. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/bb8fc69a/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/e86702af/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Could you explain to me this phrase: Amibsonics (i.e. FOA) is fabulous for AMBIENCE but, alas, not for MUSIC (due to the lack of frontal emphasis) and c'mon . . . we all know it. For one, why would I want frontal emphasis? The whole point of Ambisonics is that it does NOT have any emphasis, that things can be whereever. If one might have a complaint, then that UHJ might HAVE a frontal emphasis, but then again, that doesn't matter with most kinds of music. Again, we're not trying to shoot virtual musicians blind folded. It's about creating space in a small-ish living room, what you might call ambience, which you admit it's great for. So then what's the problem? Clearly I and many of the people who even know about Ambisonics never heard anything but FOA, e.g. I was convinced of the technology having listened to a bunch of Ambisonic UHJ encoded recordings on a Meridian system, and comparing them to stereo playback. I also listened to stereo recordings played back in SuperStereo, and the conclusion was the same: vastly superior listening experience. On 13 Apr 2012, at 17:09, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Wrong. They would want it, if they ever heard it. Sorry. I've heard surround and it's just not good enough to matter -- for MUSIC. So how can you unilaterally decide that this isn't worth it, when there are plenty of people who by the very experience were convinced of Ambisonics? How many of the people you claim have decided FOA isn't worth it, have expectations that don't matter to the average music listener? e.g. I'm not interested in the opinion of a professional musician who complains that the string section isn't exactly where it was during the performance. I'm not interested in the opinion of some Audiophile geek with a recording of someone walking in a circle clapping their hands complaining that the motion perceived isn't as uniform as the person was walking in a circle. All these things don't matter at all to the enhanced euphonic experience FOA provides during playback on a half-way decent 4.0 home setup. I've heard Dark Side and I've heard Kind of Blue . . . and most of the rest of the SACD and DVD-A releases. Some are fabulous, some are not but none of it was enough. Good try. Experiment failed. Most of that stuff has really nothing to do with FOA, because that to a large degree was 5.1 junk, with old-fashioned pan-pot mixes. If you're trying to say that ANY surround sound isn't good enough for music unless it has oodles of speaker channels, HOA and height information, then you might as well say there will never be surround sound good enough for music in the home, because the bar you set is too high to ever be surpassed in a home listening environment for the foreseeable future. I've recorded with Tetramics and I've set up an HSD 3D system, on which I enjoyed the 3RD DIMENSION of music -- height -- but none of this is enough. Maybe you should just decide it's not for you, and let the rest of us enjoy a less than perfect world. The way you talk reminds me of some of my friends who are single, because no girl is ever good enough for them, they will keep finding flaws even if they have a super model in front of them. If these women are not good enough for them, that's fine, they can remain single, but they should stop being spoilers for all the rest of us who enjoy women (and FOA) the way they are (it is). That's why the HOA debates happened. Smart people with well-trained ears KNOW that FOA isn't good enough. Elitism pure. I don't need someone else's smarts nor their well trained ears. As a matter of fact, IQ tests claim I'm well above average in smarts, and given that I can hear a good portion of bats in flight, I'd say my hearing isn't the worst, either. I'm sick and tired of other people deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy because of their perceived sense of superiority and qualifications. If I and many others of the few who ever even had a chance to listen to an Ambisonic setup enjoy the improvements in listening pleasure then that's plenty enough reason for this technology to exist, because the people who don't like it, like you, are not forced to listen to it. They should just be quiet and wait 500 years until maybe their perfect world manifests itself. It has nothing to do with MAG or the British government or bad timing or bad business decisions -- it doesn't *improve* the listening to MUSIC enough for people to care. Yeah, right. That's why Meridian keeps investing time and money into the system, that's why the system was invented at all etc. Let's face it, Dolby surround, matrixed, which is clearly inferior to even FOA/UHJ did have a success in the market, because the right people were behind it, and it lasted until Dolby pushed the next greatest thing (AC3), etc. Dolby understood that these things go incrementally, even though they chose a fundamentally inferior approach to the
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I think that the idea that surround is not good enough for music , good enough to matter, really does not make sense. This is more or less like restricting the idea of music to what works well enough in stereo to be all right. But that is not all music, and indeed for example it does not include orchestral music. Of course we have all experienced this kind of reasoning in practice. When I had electrostatics with limited bass and dynamics, I hardly ever listened to big orchestral music(in recorded form). It did not work well with that system so I just listened to other stuff(even though I really like big orchestra music). When all there were were turntables and before I got a Nakamichi disc centering turntable, piano music was a problem(on account of off centered records). Once I got a Nakamichi (and digital came along), piano music became a joy again, instead of a watery imitation. And so I listened to more of it. What has happened to the audio industry in my view is that for more than fifty years, they have dealt almost exclusively with stereo. So people have evolved in their tastes to suit the medium. They listen only to music that works in stereo, and even when they do listen to things like orchestral music that obviously do not really work right in stereo, they have become adjusted to completely unrealistic presentations of the music (which really means only the notes and some of the dynamics since most of the rest is pretty screwed up). They have come to accept stereo on its own merits and have simply given up on its sounding real. Of course this happened with mono. People accepted it, completely unrealistic though it is. Then stereo showed up and all of a sudden mono seemed sort of Nowheresville. Surround could have had the same effect for music. It could have raised one's expectations of realism and made some kinds of music sound nearly right in a big way. But for various reasons, it did not happen. For one thing, the pop music industry had moved into a realm where people no longer cared about the acoustics of the venue. Music became something that was not anchored in acoustic reality with a real venue. But a lot of music is so anchored. And for that , surround done right is still valuable. But done right is the operative phrase. Robert ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Folks: ALL reproduced music is a special effect -- if you wish to hear a performance, as it was actually played, go to the performance. MONO is a special effect. STEREO is a special effect. SURROUND is a special effect. MP3 is a special effect. None of them is a live performance. And, no amount of money spent by audiophiles can change that. Neither can a few extremely well-executed recordings. It will always be a special effect and everyone knows it. Starting In the 1960s, the *stereo* special effect beat out the *mono* special effect for the reproduction of music. A lot of people *made* a lot of money as a new mass-market was generated, culminating in the CD (followed by MP3 etc.) Beginning in the 1990s, the music industry tried to promote the *surround* (i.e. 5.1 style) special effect -- driven by the installed base of home theaters and DVD players, along with a preceived need to recapture the revenues being lost in CD sales (due to the MP3 special effect). They *spent* a lot of money, tried various technologies, and they failed. The consumer did not believe that it was good enough (i.e. compared to the stereo special effect) to make the switch. No one is going to try that again. Furthermore, as music reproduction shifted to MP3-based online delivery and ear-bud reproduction (i.e. another version of the stereo special effect) -- the idea of pretending that all this isn't a *special effect* by trying to get absolute sound in your living-room just seemed more ridiculous than ever. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. By the 1990s, the ground of our experience had shifted from the acoustic/electric to the tactile/digital and we were freed to do whatever we wanted with sound. People playing with Ambisonics was the result. But our personal interests no longer intersect with the now obsolete efforts to generate mass-markets around new sonic special effects. Lou Reed can play around all he wants. It will not create a new mass-market for a new special effect. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/10ced087/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Being doctrinaire is really not a substitute for thinking. Of course no reproduced music at home is going to be identical to live experience. No one suggested it was. But one could get closer. And it is just silly to say go to the performance. The music played , even in major cities, is a very small fraction of what one might like to hear. It makes no sense to say case closed all the time. And monotonous repetition of buzz words like special effect contributes nothing to anything. Things like this are never closed. Who would have predicted in 1975 the current state of things? (IBM famously said that computers would never become popular home appliances, to take a particularly egregious instance of case closed being completely wrong.) Things change all the time. Furthermore it is silly to say that surround failed because of its not being musically interesting. The first try failed (SQ, Quad etc) because it really does not work well to try to put multiple channels on an LP. The second round failed at least in part because the industry shot the effort in the foot by failing to agree on a single format. DVD versus SACD ruined everything at that point. But who is to say that it will never come back? Lots of people have 5.1 home theater setups. They could play music on them. It could sound good. It could all happen easily enough especially since data distribution is getting so easy. It would be nice if Ambisonics were positioned to participate if this does happen. c Robert On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote: Folks: D ALL reproduced music is a special effect -- if you wish to hear a performance, as it was actually played, go to the performance. MONO is a special effect. STEREO is a special effect. SURROUND is a special effect. MP3 is a special effect. None of them is a live performance. And, no amount of money spent by audiophiles can change that. Neither can a few extremely well-executed recordings. It will always be a special effect and everyone knows it. Starting In the 1960s, the *stereo* special effect beat out the *mono* special effect for the reproduction of music. A lot of people *made* a lot of money as a new mass-market was generated, culminating in the CD (followed by MP3 etc.) Beginning in the 1990s, the music industry tried to promote the *surround* (i.e. 5.1 style) special effect -- driven by the installed base of home theaters and DVD players, along with a preceived need to recapture the revenues being lost in CD sales (due to the MP3 special effect). They *spent* a lot of money, tried various technologies, and they failed. The consumer did not believe that it was good enough (i.e. compared to the stereo special effect) to make the switch. No one is going to try that again. Furthermore, as music reproduction shifted to MP3-based online delivery and ear-bud reproduction (i.e. another version of the stereo special effect) -- the idea of pretending that all this isn't a *special effect* by trying to get absolute sound in your living-room just seemed more ridiculous than ever. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. By the 1990s, the ground of our experience had shifted from the acoustic/electric to the tactile/digital and we were freed to do whatever we wanted with sound. People playing with Ambisonics was the result. But our personal interests no longer intersect with the now obsolete efforts to generate mass-markets around new sonic special effects. Lou Reed can play around all he wants. It will not create a new mass-market for a new special effect. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/10ced087/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Robert: Who would have predicted in 1975 the current state of things? Many did exactly that. In particular, the reality of technology increasing the productivity of manufacturing such that labor-arbitrage would come to dominate global trade and that the post-industrial economies would not understand how to cope with these new circumstances, was widely appreciated. IBM famously said that computers would never become popular home appliances, to take a particularly egregious instance of case closed being completely wrong. Sorry, that is not what happened. In fact, right around 1975, a fellow at IBM named Gary Chen (who I knew well) predicted to IBM's senior management that there was a *very* large market opportunity at the $5K (and below) price-point (based on a Paretto curve of demand vs. price/performance), which began the effort that led to the IBM PC -- based on the same Microsoft and Intel technology that still dominates the 500M unit market for the PC today. The fact that so many people in the hi-fi industry have been wrong in their predictions doesn't mean that predictions can't be made -- just that they aren't very good at it. Obviously no one should take my own predictions with anything more than a LARGE grain-of-salt -- even if (or maybe because) I might be one of the few on this list who has made a 40-year career out of predicting these things -- however, I can only hope that I have at least stimulated some thinking and perhaps even a little entertainment! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/bde7375e/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I do. I have two classic Ambisonic decoders, a old Meridian in the sitting room, decoding to 5.1 speakers (the TV shares the speakers), and an ancient Minim AD10-based system in my office with 4 good speakers (soon to be extended to a 6-speaker hexagon array). Both are horizontal-only, obviously; much as I would like a full periphonic system, I prefer not to invade my living space with more speakers. Gerard On 13/04/2012 08:37, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 13 April 2012 03:08 +0100 Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote: ... Actually, I'd be interested to know how many people on this list listen to surround recordings on a surround system for simple pleasure, as opposed to in the lab or as part of specific investigations of the process. Paul ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 00:43, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: The cardboard speakers that ship with affordable 5.1 systems are not suitable for music, and anything halfway acceptable is on a good sale at least $250/speaker, which means with four speakers you're at or above $1k, add a decent four channel amp, cables, speaker stands, etc. and you're well above the typical consumer price level already. Agreed generally. But it _*is*_ possible to get decent speakers more cheaply, if you try. I got eight Wharfedale Diamond 8 Pro Active speakers at prices ranging from £100/pr to just under £200/pr, all new in their boxes. About half were unopened, still with the original Wharfedale tape and staples on the boxes; the others were new 'B'-stock - opened for display, but otherwise perfect. All came with a full guarantee from the dealer - most of them came from Dolphin Music. Great value, and no need to spend money on separate power amps. It took me about a year to get them, buying one or two pairs at a time as they became available at a price I was willing to pay (the last ones were the cheapest!). Technology hasn't moved on. 5.1 is 4.0 plus a crappy center speaker that has a totally different tonal quality and never blends with the other four lousy speakers, plus a subwoofer to make up for the fact that the other speakers are lousy. Four full-range speakers in a 4.0 configuration is better than what 99% of people have in their homes, and cost near what they could possibly afford. To talk about higher channel count is totally disregarding economic realities. Again, not necessarily so. I have a '5.1' set of Wharfedale bookshelf speakers (not the same as the ones mentioned above). Actually it's 5.0 since with four decent bookshelf speakers and a matching, slightly larger, centre speaker, bass is adequate for TV/videos and surprisingly good for classical music; so I didn't get a '.1' subwoofer. The bookshelf speakers all have a 5 bass unit as well as a tweeter; the centre speaker has 2 x 5 bass units of the same type as the bookshelf speakers and the same tweeter. Driven via the Meridian preamp, they put out a nicely balanced sound, provided you don't want too loud; the Meridian makes sure the bass goes to the 5 normal speakers. Gerard -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/3117c477/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I ain't objecting to HOA. I'd love to have a HOA system again for normal listening; I /have/ heard it and agree it is good. But two things argue against it: 1.) Cost for a home installation. Despite what I wrote in an earlier message today, it was hard work to assemble even 8 /good/ speakers cheaply. I got them for HOA, but I probably will not use them for it, at least not for long, because 2) Having lots of speakers on one room is not compatible with home harmony or with visual aesthetics. Sadly, that is the killer. Bandwidth, storage, processing power? Yes, they are all affordable now. Now we need to find a solution to my point 2 above - and that is not an Ambisonics problem! In practice, Ambisonics is most useful as a production tool. Only a dedicated few will use it in a home environment. Only when the speakers can be effectively hidden from view without compromising the qualities needed for Ambisonics and for serious music reproduction will it have the potential to become part of the home system. Gerard Lardner On 13/04/2012 09:07, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 04/13/2012 03:49 AM, Robert Greene wrote: While the mode of expression is even more emphatic than my own, RCFA is to my mind right all up and down the line. Talking about 3rd order is just castles in the air. As a theoretical mathematician, I spend most of my life building castles in the air. But one ought to know that that is what they are! you know, for every email you guys write about this tired old topic, i have _set up_ and _calibrated_ a higher order ambisonic system, and believe me, that's way more exciting. can you please stick your heads out the window eventually? it's 2012, bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, storage even more so [1]. there is absolutely no valid argument to be made against very high orders indeed for production and archival. get it in your heads that there is a difference between what the consumer uses and what the production format is. this is what ambisonics is all about: scalability. you get to keep your meridians and your four quad speakers, and everyone can just live happily ever after. [1] the only thing that's probably even cheaper is opinions. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/04d2ec7f/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
yes indeed. perfect example. and easily applied to gaming (i use that adjective with tongue approaching cheek). imagine the laser quest with HUD in a room, with virtual fighters, and true sound placement around you. kids would (of all ages) pony up large money for such an experience. but for me, i'd really like some tools to use in film mixing (even with the distributed Ls and Rs speakers). anyone on the list care to tell me what tools might be best, or why it just won't work? the idea is to simply improve location and immersive aspects of film sound, whether played in a theatre or in home theatre. (yes, assume the home has a decent home theatre playback, and by decent, i include something like a Bose-qulality system with 5 small satellites --not full range-- and appropriate sub, such as the one bob ludwig uses at Gateway for clients to listen on as a real world living room). would G format *not* benefit this type of setup at all? (yes! assume the speakers are in the right places, ITU layout). At 8:38 -0400 4/11/12, Neil Waterman wrote: We have been using ambisonics for several years now to provide immersive soundfields for use within the flight simulation and training environments. Prior to this we were using gain panning that was restrictive and highly coupled to each installation. The use of ambi allows us to port a model from one implementation to another with little modification to the underlying sound simulation model. Cheers, Neil ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
seva s...@soundcurrent.com wrote: ... but for me, i'd really like some tools to use in film mixing (even with the distributed Ls and Rs speakers). anyone on the list care to tell me what tools might be best, or why it just won't work? the idea is to simply improve location and immersive aspects of film sound, whether played in a theatre or in home theatre. Cinemas are hostile environments for Ambisonics. Theatre managers want to cram in as many paying punters as possible so, inevitably, some of them end up close to a surround speaker. Low order Ambisonics has trouble with this. While we happily denigrate 5.1, it is always worth remembering that it was designed to work in these hostile environments. Chris Travis expressed this succinctly in a post in October 2008: || Surround sound in cinemas is less ambitious || than many people assume. This is a matter || of practicality, given the number/spread of || the seats. Regards, Martin -- Martin J Leese E-mail: martin.leese stanfordalumni.org Web: http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 12/04/2012 18:31, Martin Leese wrote: sevas...@soundcurrent.com wrote: ... but for me, i'd really like some tools to use in film mixing (even with the distributed Ls and Rs speakers). anyone on the list care to tell me what tools might be best, or why it just won't work? the idea is to simply improve location and immersive aspects of film sound, whether played in a theatre or in home theatre. Cinemas are hostile environments for Ambisonics. ... Possibly I simply haven't been to enough high-spec cinemas, but I tend to the opinion that cinemas are fairly hostile environments for audio generally. Too often, dialogue + foley + sfx + music = a mess, immersive or otherwise. A person may see a film once in the cinema, but maybe many times at home, so strategically, at least, the latter should arguably be the priority. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that one can't go up in order, just forget about it all. Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not only listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints. So maybe you should forget about it all, because there are plenty of people who enjoy that which you claim one should forget about. It's these sort of phrases that killed the potential adoption of Ambisonics a few years ago. The nice thing, people keep outing themselves... It's exactly this elitist attitude that keeps the ball from moving. 1st order is thoroughly enjoyable, and were it not for the not-so-smooth DACs maybe some other digital sins that Onkyo did in it's 808 receiver, I'd be a happy camper with that setup, but the sound quality of that device can't compete with a clean stereo amp, so it's surround vs. good sound. Some day, I'll fix that by using an old computer as a processor, and some high-end DAC as converter, and then I'll have the best of both. And I'll still massively prefer UHJ-1st-order-Ambisonics on four speakers over plain stereo. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13/04/2012 12:13 AM, seva wrote: but for me, i'd really like some tools to use in film mixing (even with the distributed Ls and Rs speakers). anyone on the list care to tell me what tools might be best, or why it just won't work? the idea is to simply improve location and immersive aspects of film sound, whether played in a theatre or in home theatre. Have you tried SPAT from IRCAM? It's pretty good and has sped up workflow for film mixing. Cheers, Haig ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Meridian may be expensive, too, but at least they are sticking with Ambisonics. Full horizontal 1st order B-format is now included in their decoders, as well as UHJ, superstereo and Trifield. Oh, and I'm a Meridian customer enjoying one of the few (only?) current domestic ambisonic decoders. Still damned expensive, so I've not replaced mine for nearly 15 years. I could just about cope with full 2nd order horizontal (6 speakers) but not 3rd with eight speakers in my typically small UK sitting room. Height is out of the question, People clearly put 5 and sometimes 7 speakers in their listening/entertainment rooms (in all sorts of odd places, though), so G-format should be possible, too (up to 3rd order?). For home use, I use superstereo with the TV and, as long as the width control is kept narrow-ish, centrally based sounds tie in well with what's happening on-screen. Sounds-off, such as doors closing and people speaking about to come into the image from left or right, can give a nicely widened perspective on a performance. I've only really been used to UHJ as a home user so I'm looking forward to full 1st order for music, classical and otherwise. I'd love to try UHJ with the TV. I suspect the dominance of a large TV image will tend to direct (sharpen?) perception of sound source positions on a TV screen, as happens anyway with TV speakers placed well off centre. Cinema may be a non-starter but not home use. IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't clearly worth promoting along with up to 3rd order G-format decodes for 5.1/7.1 setups for home users. Basically, get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get on with full 1st and higher orders. Steve On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:05, Fons Adriaensen wrote: On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:47:04PM +0200, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that one can't go up in order, just forget about it all. Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not only listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints. First order is certainly fine for classical orchestral music, and I enjoy that as well even without Meridian's help. But that will reach a minoriy classical music lovers audience only. And first order fails rather miserably for anything else compared to 5.1 which is what people already have and can compare with. It won't produce a stable front channel for movie sound, nor has it the the required spatial definition for effects that work outside a very small sweet spot. And what's the problem with five or seven channels anyway ? This has nothing to do with 'elitism'. Try selling 256-color computer displays to today's consumers. Won't work even if they would do fine for 99% of all practical computer applications. It's too late for that. Technology has moved on, and people know it. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 12 Apr 2012, at 23:05, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:47:04PM +0200, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that one can't go up in order, just forget about it all. Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not only listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints. First order is certainly fine for classical orchestral music, and I enjoy that as well even without Meridian's help. It works also for all sorts of other music that wants to create swirling sound scapes, etc. We're not trying to help blind people to target shoot by sound, we're essentially looking for artificial musical sound effects and natural sounding ambience. But that will reach a minoriy classical music lovers audience only. And first order fails rather miserably for anything else compared to 5.1 which is what people already have and can compare with. Essentially nobody listens to music in surround format, particularly not in a mass market. Also, I rather have less precise spatial resolution than what might be achievable with 5.1, but have it sound natural, not the sound out of speakers that most 5.1 productions end up having. Besides, G-Format would also end up being 5.1. It won't produce a stable front channel for movie sound, nor has it the the required spatial definition for effects that work outside a very small sweet spot. Movies have no reason to switch to Ambisonics. The visual dominates the ear, and so there's no need for natural sound, because we're absorbed by the movie, and the movie studios are not going to change their production workflow or their love affair with DTS/Dolby anytime soon. So Ambisonics for movies is utterly irrelevant, at least until such point that it has proven to be a resounding success in music. And what's the problem with five or seven channels anyway ? Three things: cost, cost, and cost. The cardboard speakers that ship with affordable 5.1 systems are not suitable for music, and anything halfway acceptable is on a good sale at least $250/speaker, which means with four speakers you're at or above $1k, add a decent four channel amp, cables, speaker stands, etc. and you're well above the typical consumer price level already. This isn't about what grant money can buy in a computer lab, this is what a waiter, someone making $1500/month, etc. i.e. the typical iPad/AppleTV buyer could afford, not what a doctor or lawyer would buy if only they had a clue about technology. This has nothing to do with 'elitism'. Try selling 256-color computer displays to today's consumers. Won't work even if they would do fine for 99% of all practical computer applications. It's too late for that. Technology has moved on, and people know it. Technology hasn't moved on. 5.1 is 4.0 plus a crappy center speaker that has a totally different tonal quality and never blends with the other four lousy speakers, plus a subwoofer to make up for the fact that the other speakers are lousy. Four full-range speakers in a 4.0 configuration is better than what 99% of people have in their homes, and cost near what they could possibly afford. To talk about higher channel count is totally disregarding economic realities. Further, it's also not about Madonna or some stars who have the budget and access to engineers who might actually understand what they are doing. This is about the majority of musicians who record themselves, or who go to some local dude with a computer and analog mixing desk that sounds horrible but looks impressive to have their music produced. These people are not going to ever understand spherical harmonics, nth order something or another. They can intuitively grasp front-back, left-right and mono. They will be able to make a stereo CD (UHJ), and have an extra gimmick to sell: now you can listen to your CD in surround sound. Nobody is talking about stable images, just as little as The Beatles stereo recordings were Blumlein stereo. But they can make sounds swirl around, and people who do location recording can get a decent ambience. All of that is better than what is accessible to most consumers, musicians, and recording studios today. It is breadth that will get something like this going. It's not the best that is winning, but the most accessible. Once limited Ambisonics is sufficiently adopted, then it's time to show that there's more to this. You're not going to get people to mix single tracks with the channel count that e.g. 2nd order requires unless there's already established demand for surround music. There are also no decent tools around, no DAWs with built-in support for 2nd or 3rd order Ambisonic production, and they won't be, because nobody is going
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 13 Apr 2012, at 00:53, Steven Dive stevend...@mac.com wrote: IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't clearly worth promoting [...] Basically, get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get on with full 1st and higher orders. Amen. Can't feed a baby with a steak. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Steven Dive wrote: IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't clearly worth promoting along with up to 3rd order G-format decodes for 5.1/7.1 setups for home users. Basically, get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get on with full 1st and higher orders. Steve Steve, Anthony: In which sense is UHJ and superstereo a viable alternative to 5.1 surround, if 5.1 is clearly better than any 2-channel system can be? You should introduce something which exceeds the existing solutions, not going back to something which fits into the stereo distribution chain. We already had this. I have written that you could decode a 3rd order .AMB file on a 4 or 6 speaker home installation, for example ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order components. 8 speakers would be even better, but less is still possible. (You can watch a 1080p movie on an underspecified SD television, or a 720 line TV. The loudspeaker number above is just the equivalent. Downsizing a format to a device with lower resolution is mostly not an issue. You also can watch a photo on a computer screen, even if the resolution of a current digital camera is certainly much higher than any computer monitor can show.) Anthony: You should read what people (this means: me! :-) ) say, not what you would like to read. For example, I never said anywhere that music should be distributed on BD discs. (Have been here a long time before. This is probably just history. IMO the distribution of surround music via UHJ stereo tracks belongs into the same category. Listen to UHJ if available and if you can decode this, but don't promote this for the future practical distribution of surround, because 5.1 already exists.) I said that Apple doesn't support BD movies on any Mac OS version. I don't buy into the excuse that the Blu-ray DRM (AACA/BD+ support) would break the Mac OS architecture, which would be a longer discussion. But I have actually more important things to do than to discuss these issues here, honestly. (Historically: Apple had pretended they would finally support Blu-Ray, in 2005/2006. They didn't tell it would not be possible. The bag of hurt story was invented way later. ) I don't have to promote Ambisonics, specifically I don't have any plans to replace 5.1 with FOA. What is the huge deal about? (Both formats have advantages and disadvantages, compared to each other. You also have to consider that 5.1 can be mixed or recorded in very different ways, and some or actually pretty convincing. For film, 5.1 is probably superior. You could say that FOA has been unfaily neglected which is probably right.) If you promote G format, 99% would see and listen to this as a 5.1 surround file. (An 99% would listen to an UHJ as a stereo file, cos there are really very few decoders around. In fact, 5.1 seems to be way more mainstream than decoded UHJ.) Therefore, don't push for stereo-matrixed (UHJ) or pre-encoded (G format, 5.1) Ambisonics variants in 2012. In fact, Apple (or Microsoft, Google Music (?), Sony Music Unlimited or whoever sells movies/music) should firstly offer 5.1 surround files. It doesn't cost anything to offer another surround format in an online shop, if music/audio is available in this format. The consumer could chose. But if you offer something beside 5.1 surround, I believe this should be something better. Not something reduced. Try to find solutions which are viable for the next 10 or 20 years, and don't go back 20 years. (Sorry for being slightly polemic, but I think this is a valid argument.) Surround tracks are sold via the Internet, there are plenty of existing online shops. The problem is that you would have to sell 5.1 (or FOA...) tracks of well-known music, which means the hits. The Majors are missing this opportunity. (Plenty of recordings ae available, which means many thousands.) As a musician, I am participating in plenty recordings which are done also in 5.1. In this sense, don't call me elitist, or whatever. But FOA probably won't make it. The time of UHJ has been. I am not sure that any form of surround will make it into the home, but I think there is still a real chance that it will happen. The iTunes shop is currently irrelevant for surround music, and there are more companies around than Apple. Best, Stefan Schreiber On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:05, Fons Adriaensen wrote: On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:47:04PM +0200, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote: First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that one can't go up in order, just forget about it all. Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not only listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints. First order is certainly fine for classical orchestral music, and I
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
We have been using ambisonics for several years now to provide immersive soundfields for use within the flight simulation and training environments. Prior to this we were using gain panning that was restrictive and highly coupled to each installation. The use of ambi allows us to port a model from one implementation to another with little modification to the underlying sound simulation model. Cheers, Neil On Apr 10, 2012, at 4:48 PM, seva wrote: i firmly believe there are existing and evolving areas for use of immersive audio. movies, anyone? i'd prefer to have something other than 5, 6, 7 .1 formats with various implementations (3 across front, 5 across front, 1 center, 2 sides, whatever) that simply gives a better immersive experience to the audience. games, anyone? as mentioned later in this thread, head-tracking systems combined with immersive audio would be a rather serious elephant in the room for the Very Large Money in gaming. Seva D. L. Ball Audio Engineering / Systems Soundcurrent Mastering AES, NARAS, ARSC, IASA, FAM At 11:12 -0400 4/3/12, newme...@aol.com wrote: Peter: So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialized musical presentation. Correct! This is the presentation that comes along with perspective in Renaissance painting and the linearity of printed books, etc. It is a product, if you will, of the Gutenberg Galaxy -- which, in turn, started to unravel in the 19th century, yielding electric music and ending the classical period in composition. This is, perhaps, why the Bell Labs experiments that yielded the 3-channel stereo (which they determined was the minimum needed to actually produce a solid musical image, especially for an audience) was discussed in the 1934 Symposium on Auditory Perspective. _http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf_ (http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf) So, on this account, you might expect that some music that preceded the imposition of this EYE-based conformity would exhibit more respect for the surround, just as you would expect that some music that followed the relaxing of this *environmental* constraint might also begin to explicitly investigate the *spherical* nature of sound. That is, of course, exactly what seems to have happened! None of which, however, changes the fact that in the electric era -- the first and only media environment which created MASS audiences -- music continued to be largely an expression of the unconscious orientation for perspective (i.e. linear, eye-based, frontal performances), which then became a very conscious part of the commercialization of performances -- in our own living-rooms. It would have to wait for the further shift from *electric* to *digital* media environment for all of this -- both the linearity of Gutenberg and the chaos of modernity -- to begin to appear as arbitrary and merely historical accidents. Now, we are ready for Ambisonics (but not as a mass-market phenomenon) . . . as we all become MEDIEVAL (or, if you prefer, post-modern) once again!! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 4/3/2012 10:44:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, p.len...@derby.ac.uk writes: I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners. In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, relevance. So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical presentation. So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances. Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology University of Derby, UK tel: 01332 593155 e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Malham Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept. On the other hand,when talking about acoustic _concert_ music, it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented, because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the same time, probably
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
i firmly believe there are existing and evolving areas for use of immersive audio. movies, anyone? i'd prefer to have something other than 5, 6, 7 .1 formats with various implementations (3 across front, 5 across front, 1 center, 2 sides, whatever) that simply gives a better immersive experience to the audience. games, anyone? as mentioned later in this thread, head-tracking systems combined with immersive audio would be a rather serious elephant in the room for the Very Large Money in gaming. Seva D. L. Ball Audio Engineering / Systems Soundcurrent Mastering AES, NARAS, ARSC, IASA, FAM At 11:12 -0400 4/3/12, newme...@aol.com wrote: Peter: So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialized musical presentation. Correct! This is the presentation that comes along with perspective in Renaissance painting and the linearity of printed books, etc. It is a product, if you will, of the Gutenberg Galaxy -- which, in turn, started to unravel in the 19th century, yielding electric music and ending the classical period in composition. This is, perhaps, why the Bell Labs experiments that yielded the 3-channel stereo (which they determined was the minimum needed to actually produce a solid musical image, especially for an audience) was discussed in the 1934 Symposium on Auditory Perspective. _http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf_ (http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf) So, on this account, you might expect that some music that preceded the imposition of this EYE-based conformity would exhibit more respect for the surround, just as you would expect that some music that followed the relaxing of this *environmental* constraint might also begin to explicitly investigate the *spherical* nature of sound. That is, of course, exactly what seems to have happened! None of which, however, changes the fact that in the electric era -- the first and only media environment which created MASS audiences -- music continued to be largely an expression of the unconscious orientation for perspective (i.e. linear, eye-based, frontal performances), which then became a very conscious part of the commercialization of performances -- in our own living-rooms. It would have to wait for the further shift from *electric* to *digital* media environment for all of this -- both the linearity of Gutenberg and the chaos of modernity -- to begin to appear as arbitrary and merely historical accidents. Now, we are ready for Ambisonics (but not as a mass-market phenomenon) . . . as we all become MEDIEVAL (or, if you prefer, post-modern) once again!! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 4/3/2012 10:44:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, p.len...@derby.ac.uk writes: I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners. In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, relevance. So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical presentation. So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances. Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology University of Derby, UK tel: 01332 593155 e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Malham Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept. On the other hand,when talking about acoustic _concert_ music, it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented, because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves - and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably increasingly in it's
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Stefan/Robert/et al: Right on! Apple clearly wants to take over the world. Not quite. Apple is in fact very pleased to be a *minority* market-share holder -- as it is in everything except iTunes and iPads (for the moment) -- just as long as it gets UNNATURAL margins from its products. As perhaps the only ex-Wall Street analyst on this list, I can tell you that Apple's success has been founded on two principles 1) get your semiconductors at below market prices (to drive up gross margins, at the expense of all the other non-fab semi-conductor buyers) and 2) keep the system closed (so that the minority in the market who prize this end-to-end engineering will be happy *plus* to ensure that you have no direct competitors.) And, it's worked pretty well . . . however, they will inevitably run out of CHEAP-chip string. In particular, IBM, Motorola, Intel and Samsung (i.e. the world's largest semiconductor shops) have all gotten over having Apple as a semiconductor customer. Btw, Apple's shift from Power to the Intel architecture was a direct result of IBM and Motorola refusing to subsidize Apple anymore, whereas (for a while) Intel was willing. Then (for a while) Samsung was willing . . . now Hynix and others? For what it is worth (which could be a lot, if you like to gamble shorting AAPL), gross margins at Apple cannot remain so far outside the industry norm forever and at the first sign of declines, the stock will fall and never again regain its lofty valuation. Or so I used to tell my hedge-fund clients . . . g Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120409/e4625052/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: There was once a slim chance of getting Apple to move on Ambisonics, as both some fundamental interest by some of Apple's CoreAudio group and relentless lobbying by an unnamed list member in an unnamed Apple product beta test group produced a slight opening of maybe getting 1st order B-Format adopted, when all the perfectionist zealots on this list more or less undermined it all by screaming that anything below 2nd or 3rd order is worthless, at which point pretty much all interest at Apple evaporated. Some people still don't get that I rather have imperfect 1st order Ambisonics which is perfectly adequate at producing realistic sounding ambiance, than wait until 50 years after my death to have a perfect 5th order system adopted by whoever is then a dominant player in audio technology. There's a reason why there's the old phrase Shoot the engineer, start production... Ronald I get tired of discussions we already have had on this list, several times at least... :-) 1. 3rd order .AMB format can be decoded to a 5.1 ITU/Dolby setup. (Results would be clearly superior than a decoding from Ambionics 1st order to 5.1 ITU. This is because the resolution of 3rd order .AMB fits better to the - relatively detailled- front resolution of 5.1.) 2. You also can decode 3rd order .AMB to (just) 4 speakers. (Even if 3rd order Ambisonics is overspecified if decoded to just 4 or 6 speakers, I personally don't see any fundamental or even practical problems. This needs probably some further discussion, but at least this is something practically relevant ... Just a hint for the overspecification/underspecification purists: A 1st order soundfield recording can be reduced to plain old stereo, or say UHJ stereo. And Ambisonics 1st order fans usually don't complain if Ambisonics is presented on an underspecified loudspeaker array of just 2 speakers... ) 3. Any realistic 3rd order decoder could also handle 1st order Ambisonics. This is important, because real-world Ambisonics recordings are mostly/next-to-always 1st order. The concept of UHJ and G formats is from the 80s/90s, respectively. In the case of G format, height is still missing. (You can't recover height information from G format.) I personally do support that height should be included in any future suround format above 5.1, especially since you can ignore height infomation on horizontal arrays. This is actually the way most people listen to the few existing Ambisonics recordings - height is just left out. Even so, B format is a 4-channel format, not a 3-channel reduction without height... Which means that you can offer more than most people would use. You could also decode Ambisonics to binaural headphones with motion-compensation (height included), if motion-compensating headphones would be introduced into the market. (I didn't write mass market, because markets have to grow. And currently there are headphone prototypes with motion-compensation, but no market, or say a very limited market. Probably they will use some of this stuff for virtual reality/ simulators/ training.) You could also decode Ambisonics to Ambiophonics, and the 6 speaker variant Mark (Stahlman) has mentioned before. (Not a hybrid system, BTW.) Coming back to former postings of this thread: Of course we don't live in KANSAS, and the iPhone and iPad are not really mass-market! (Think of different smallish ecosystems of users, which accidentally buy the same product. :-P ) Surround and Apple: Apple doesn't even sell 5.1 tracks on iTunes, and there is clearly plenty of recorded/mixed 5.1 stuff around. Though don't blame the list for internal bickering/infighting when Apple is just not offering any surround sound on iTunes! (Some other online shops offer surround sound, but remain small.) G format is 5.1, so no way around some simple facts. Apple doesn't offer any surround recordings, they never have supported Blu-Ray (being a BDA board member), and I could find many other examples. It appaently doesn't matter for the financial health of Apple if they support surround or not. (If it is about their customers, they frankly didn't care if anyone wanted to reproduce a BD disc on a Mac PC - which clearly has been demanded by a few.) So, Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt for Apple, and maybe surround is just irrelevant. For them... You are also not entitled to install some little program witten by yourself on your iPad. (You have to be protected against yourself, so to speak. But you might install it from their app-store... ;-) ) There's a reason why there's the old phrase Shoot the engineer, start production... You are welcome... Without a player like Apple jumping on it, Ambisonics is dead in the water, because frankly I'm rather uninterested in having to set up my listening environment for 20 minutes before I can play some obscure avant-garde musical experiment in
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. Very interesting! Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio (other than on purchased movies)? As best I can tell, they do not. Why would they in the future? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY Just read this now. (Came back from a journey.) So and of course, the same main argument here... Best, Stefan ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure. Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a result they are getting nothing ever. Ronald Eloquent, but clearly wrong. (Apple also doesn't support any 5.1 music on iTunes.) Who is they , by the way? The people who are working with HOA?! Ciao, Stefan ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: The problem is: who still needs hardware? Unless it's incorporated into something like an Oppo DVD/BD player, which hooks up directly to a power amp, the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV that gets its data stream from a computer server, i.e. iTunes. At least that's the scenario for the average techno-phile user without a huge budget. The luddites still have CD players, but they are going to die out just like the Vinyl and 8-Track are slowly sliding towards their graves. - the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV that gets its data stream from a computer server, i.e. iTunes. iTunes TV/film content will play on every TV, this is just an interface question. The luddites still have CD players, but they are going to die out just like the Vinyl and 8-Track are slowly sliding towards their graves. Vinyl doesn't seem to die nowadays, like it or not. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120104vinyl CDs are as valid as iTunes downloads, in fact offering better-quality than iTunes (AAC) downloads, and you can rip the tracks to any format you want. (AAC, MP3) CD sales have been quite stable in 2011. Anyway: Good night, and thanks for the free Apple promotion... Stefan P.S.: The problem is: who still needs hardware? ... the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV I am really confused, by now. :-D ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: Again, it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. As a matter of fact, when it comes to standards Apple does more to push them than just about any other force in the market. Others push things like Flash, Think again of Blu-Ray (movie) support on MacOS. Is there one? (BR drives are supported, only the films don't play...) Apple is actually - according to my best knowledge - still a director company in the Blu Ray Disc Association. BD licensing might be a bag of hurt or not, but there are existing solutions for Windows PCs. (Historically this is quite odd, as Microsoft had supported HD-DVD. If Microsoft can support Blu-Ray on Windows, Apple could on MacOS.) I am also sure that Apple couldn't afford the high licensing fees, even if they probably would not pay at all... :-D The reason for this is - of course - that Apple chose not to support Blu-Ray, and to sell films (SD, HD) on the propietary iTunes store. Apple is so clearly promoting propietary solutions that you have to be blind not to admit this. There are other examples. I am actually not complaining about, but let us keep the facts. it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. Oh yeah, they have to offer a closed and walled garden. Otherwise things would not work as PERFECT as Apple users expect... Best, Stefan Schreiber P.S.: And they care since years for the best and safest working conditions at the Foxconn plants, and so on. (Even if evidence and independent reports tell otherwise. They got some pressure ecently, thanks to NYT and others, but the problems are actually quite old.) But as long as loyal Apple customers buy into the stuff and every excuse, there is maybe not enough incentive to change policy. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Unless of course they publish a file format for it Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage up. :) Please do! A group of us proposed a CAF based file format at Graz (in 2009) http://mchapman.com/amb/reprints/AFF.pdf It had a mixed response ;-) It has though been taken forward and a further proposal was made at the US Ambisonics symposium by Christian Nachbar (Graz) and colleagues. (N3D instead of SN3D, being one major change.) Time has brought greater agreement and stability. As I wasn't at York, and as the Graz folks are on this List, I won't give a reference as it would probably be out-of-date, anyway. So problem solved Michael ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
The 2011 paper by Nachbar, et al, ambiX - A Suggested Ambisonics Format, specifies SN3D as the normalization scheme. (see eqn 3 in section 2.1, The normalization that seems most agreeable is SN3D...) The papers are here http://ambisonics.iem.at/proceedings-of-the-ambisonics-symposium-2011 -- Aaron Heller (hel...@ai.sri.com) Menlo Park, CA US On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:48 AM, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote: Unless of course they publish a file format for it Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage up. :) Please do! A group of us proposed a CAF based file format at Graz (in 2009) http://mchapman.com/amb/reprints/AFF.pdf It had a mixed response ;-) It has though been taken forward and a further proposal was made at the US Ambisonics symposium by Christian Nachbar (Graz) and colleagues. (N3D instead of SN3D, being one major change.) Time has brought greater agreement and stability. As I wasn't at York, and as the Graz folks are on this List, I won't give a reference as it would probably be out-of-date, anyway. So problem solved Michael ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Thanks the correction. Yes, the move was N3D _to_ SN3D. Three years on from the original proposal and one on from the improvements, hopefully this is stable ( ... unless there any seismic improvemnts at York ???). Michael The 2011 paper by Nachbar, et al, ambiX - A Suggested Ambisonics Format, specifies SN3D as the normalization scheme. (see eqn 3 in section 2.1, The normalization that seems most agreeable is SN3D...) The papers are here http://ambisonics.iem.at/proceedings-of-the-ambisonics-symposium-2011 -- Aaron Heller (hel...@ai.sri.com) Menlo Park, CA US On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:48 AM, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote: Unless of course they publish a file format for it Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage up. :) Please do! A group of us proposed a CAF based file format at Graz (in 2009) http://mchapman.com/amb/reprints/AFF.pdf It had a mixed response ;-) It has though been taken forward and a further proposal was made at the US Ambisonics symposium by Christian Nachbar (Graz) and colleagues. (N3D instead of SN3D, being one major change.) Time has brought greater agreement and stability. As I wasn't at York, and as the Graz folks are on this List, I won't give a reference as it would probably be out-of-date, anyway. So problem solved Michael ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ten days ago, I made an archive recording of Birmingham Opera's presentation of Jonathan Dove's new work, Life Is A Dream at a disused factory: the orchestra were in a fixed position, but the performers, including a 100-strong amateur chorus, and the audience, moved around the space. I was very restricted in how I managed to make this recording and I opted for a mix of fixed and moving M/S set-ups, spot and ambience miking, using both a mobile Soundfield SPS200 and a fixed, at the orchestra position, Core-Sound TetraMic. I'm currently listening through the recordings in order to make a definitive archive copy and when I listen to the sections of the orchestral performance in surround from the TetraMic, the results are thrilling. Similarly, the chorus sections recorded with the Soundfield in the huge space of the empty warehouse listened to in surround, are much more involving than when I drop down to a two channel mix. I've recorded Dove's work before, in Peterborough, where the performers and audience moved from the interior of the cathedral to a shopping mall via the town centre and at The Hackney Empire Theatre, where there were two choirs at opposite sides of the top balcony, an Oud ensemble in one of the high boxes, a steel band and a Salvation Army band at the opposites sides of the rear of the theatre, a jazz ensemble in one of the stage boxes and a conventional chamber orchestra in the pit. This is modern, accessible material that benefits hugely from the space in which it's performed and, although the final edit will be in stereo, I will also be supplying a surround version, just for the hell of it. I think that there's far more spatial music out there than you might think. Regards, John On 3 Apr 2012, at 00:58, Marc Lavallée wrote: Two weeks ago, I saw a performance of Répons by Boulez. It was a canadian première, 30 years after its creation. The audience surrounded the orchestra, and six percussion instruments surrounded the audience, along with 6 speakers. It was happening in a very large room (an old boat factory), so there was an incredible mix of close and distant sounds. I saw many other concerts with instruments and sounds surrounding the audience, with music from John Cage, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and even Schubert. It may not be common, but it does exist, so we should expect some more surround recordings in a not so distant future. One of the most interesting 5.0 recordings I heard is the Virtual Haydn project, that recreates the acoustic experience of small concert halls of the 18th century. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept. On the other hand,when talking about acoustic _concert_ music, it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented, because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves - and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably increasingly in it's home countries) Gamelan is usually presented frontally (even we usually do that) but this is _not_ correct traditionally. Dave On 2 April 2012 16:34, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote: Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Music http://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448 */ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450 */ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /* http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/49f083b7/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer Dave Malham Music Research Centre Department of Music The University of York Heslington York YO10 5DD UK Phone 01904 322448 Fax 01904 322450 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 2 Apr 2012, at 23:48, newme...@aol.com wrote: No whiz-bang demos will make any difference! Ambisonics is what people are doing on this list and that's just as it should be -- PLAYING with *sound* with our friends! Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. The players have changed, it's no longer Sony and Panasonic that need to be convinced that Ambisonics is relevant, but Apple, Apple, and Apple, since Google, Android and Microsoft are just copying what Apple does anyway. Without a player like Apple jumping on it, Ambisonics is dead in the water, because frankly I'm rather uninterested in having to set up my listening environment for 20 minutes before I can play some obscure avant-garde musical experiment in surround sound. I rather have 50% of stuff produced in UHJ-Stereo-AppleLossless or something like that, warts and all, than have a handful productions that allow me to jerk off over the technical perfection provided I can afford a 16 speaker periphonic high-end setup. Frankly, I have ZERO interest in 2nd and higher-order Ambisonics, because anything beyond a 5.1/4.0 setup is impractical in any home listening environment for 90%+ of consumers, particularly if the speakers and amps are supposed to be of a quality that provide for the homogenous sound field that Ambisonics asks for. An 8.1 home setup with 6 cheesy cardboard surround effects speakers and two decent stereo front speakers isn't going to be enjoyable, and four nice speakers already cost more than most people can afford. So unless there's a magical technology breakthrough that allows speaker prices to come down an order of magnitude, anything that requires more than 4-6 high-quality speakers is just not feasible, because it pushes the system cost into a realm where only a handful of people can afford to play, which limits things to 1st-order B-, G- or UHJ-Format. And a handful of people is just not enough of an incentive for content providers to deal with the (imagined) complexities of Ambisonic production techniques, which is even worse, because the purists always scream about 1st order productions (which would still be somewhat manageable in complexity, and the four B-format channels are still someone intuitively comprehensible. Try to explain the meaning of the higher order Ambisonics channels to your average production engineer or some self-recording, self-publishing garage band...) However, everytime someone tries to do something to get 1st order stuff adopted somewhere, a cacophony of opposition comes from a variety of circles saying that it's not good enough, that the spatial resolution isn't accurate enough, etc. (Nevermind that the one thing that made me an Ambisonics convert was playing back ca. 1997 a UHJ encoded Nimbus recording on a Meridian setup, and comparing that to stereo on the same system, which pretty much proves that 1st order is plenty good enough to start with, and certainly a rather noticeable improvement over stereo) There was once a slim chance of getting Apple to move on Ambisonics, as both some fundamental interest by some of Apple's CoreAudio group and relentless lobbying by an unnamed list member in an unnamed Apple product beta test group produced a slight opening of maybe getting 1st order B-Format adopted, when all the perfectionist zealots on this list more or less undermined it all by screaming that anything below 2nd or 3rd order is worthless, at which point pretty much all interest at Apple evaporated. Some people still don't get that I rather have imperfect 1st order Ambisonics which is perfectly adequate at producing realistic sounding ambiance, than wait until 50 years after my death to have a perfect 5th order system adopted by whoever is then a dominant player in audio technology. There's a reason why there's the old phrase Shoot the engineer, start production... Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners. In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, relevance. So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical presentation. So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances. Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology University of Derby, UK tel: 01332 593155 e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Malham Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept. On the other hand,when talking about acoustic _concert_ music, it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented, because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves - and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably increasingly in it's home countries) Gamelan is usually presented frontally (even we usually do that) but this is _not_ correct traditionally. Dave On 2 April 2012 16:34, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote: Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Music http://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448 */ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450 */ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /* http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald: Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. Very interesting! Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio (other than on purchased movies)? As best I can tell, they do not. Why would they in the future? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120403/84161fca/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. Very interesting! Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio (other than on purchased movies)? As best I can tell, they do not. Why would they in the future? No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm not sure what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel layout is dropped into iTunes and the default core-audio device happens to be a multi-channel audio interface. However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple products. e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb, core-audio supports multi-channel and has a standard surround panner that uses Ambisonic theory to achieve its task, etc. CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc. In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing floating around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and application universe that if the right people were convinced, it would not be a massive undertaking to get the basics going, i.e. something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order Horizontal-only-B-Format playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. It's something that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical product cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it, and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might enquire they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order isn't good enough and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them. After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know, and that causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch that what they do isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the equivalent of kicking the hornets nest, because they potentially confuse the average user, and then they get bad press on top, when anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple and they find plenty of people bitching about the crappy, insufficient implementation. The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure. Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a result they are getting nothing ever. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Peter: So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialized musical presentation. Correct! This is the presentation that comes along with perspective in Renaissance painting and the linearity of printed books, etc. It is a product, if you will, of the Gutenberg Galaxy -- which, in turn, started to unravel in the 19th century, yielding electric music and ending the classical period in composition. This is, perhaps, why the Bell Labs experiments that yielded the 3-channel stereo (which they determined was the minimum needed to actually produce a solid musical image, especially for an audience) was discussed in the 1934 Symposium on Auditory Perspective. _http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf_ (http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf) So, on this account, you might expect that some music that preceded the imposition of this EYE-based conformity would exhibit more respect for the surround, just as you would expect that some music that followed the relaxing of this *environmental* constraint might also begin to explicitly investigate the *spherical* nature of sound. That is, of course, exactly what seems to have happened! None of which, however, changes the fact that in the electric era -- the first and only media environment which created MASS audiences -- music continued to be largely an expression of the unconscious orientation for perspective (i.e. linear, eye-based, frontal performances), which then became a very conscious part of the commercialization of performances -- in our own living-rooms. It would have to wait for the further shift from *electric* to *digital* media environment for all of this -- both the linearity of Gutenberg and the chaos of modernity -- to begin to appear as arbitrary and merely historical accidents. Now, we are ready for Ambisonics (but not as a mass-market phenomenon) . . . as we all become MEDIEVAL (or, if you prefer, post-modern) once again!! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 4/3/2012 10:44:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, p.len...@derby.ac.uk writes: I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners. In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, relevance. So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical presentation. So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances. Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology University of Derby, UK tel: 01332 593155 e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Malham Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept. On the other hand,when talking about acoustic _concert_ music, it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented, because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves - and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably increasingly in it's home countries) Gamelan is usually presented frontally (even we usually do that) but this is _not_ correct traditionally. Dave On 2 April 2012 16:34, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I would fear an applelization of ambisonics. Apple could impose its own ok format (probably as a CAF chunk specification) with patents and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my opinion). Ronald C.F. Antony r...@cubiculum.com a écrit : On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. Very interesting! Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio (other than on purchased movies)? As best I can tell, they do not. Why would they in the future? No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm not sure what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel layout is dropped into iTunes and the default core-audio device happens to be a multi-channel audio interface. However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple products. e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb, core-audio supports multi-channel and has a standard surround panner that uses Ambisonic theory to achieve its task, etc. CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc. In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing floating around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and application universe that if the right people were convinced, it would not be a massive undertaking to get the basics going, i.e. something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order Horizontal-only-B-Format playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. It's something that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical product cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it, and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might enquire they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order isn't good enough and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them. After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know, and that causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch that what they do isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the equivalent of kicking the hornets nest, because they potentially confuse the average user, and then they get bad press on top, when anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple and they find plenty of people bitching about the crappy, insufficient implementation. The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure. Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a result they are getting nothing ever. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I think this is reaching. Music started to be in one place in front because people wanted to look at it. I think it had sod all(in deference to the British origin of Ambisonics0 to do with perspective drawing. People have always looked at what interested them. When they got really interested in music, music per se, not music to accompany other activities(no one stares at a dance band while they are dancing), they wanted to look and so they put the music in one spot and everyone looked at it. All this recylced McLuhanism tends to be a little off the mark. It is as bad as than evolutionary biology. It is too easy to make this stuff up but there is no evidence that anything that is presented is true. The ancient Greeks all looked one way at their theater, sitting in a semicircle and looking at the stage. It is a natural thing to do with a performance where the performance is the center of attention and where there is a natural direction for the performers to face(the Roman gladiators performed in the round so to speak because they did not always face the same way--the event itself had no preferred direction). But the ancient Greeks had no interest in and damned little knowledge of perspective drawing(though the Romans did know about it-- the idea that it was invented in the Renaissance is wrong. Rediscovered, yes, invented for the first time, no). Robert On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote: Peter: So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialized musical presentation. Correct! This is the presentation that comes along with perspective in Renaissance painting and the linearity of printed books, etc. It is a product, if you will, of the Gutenberg Galaxy -- which, in turn, started to unravel in the 19th century, yielding electric music and ending the classical period in composition. This is, perhaps, why the Bell Labs experiments that yielded the 3-channel stereo (which they determined was the minimum needed to actually produce a solid musical image, especially for an audience) was discussed in the 1934 Symposium on Auditory Perspective. _http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf_ (http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/bell.labs/auditoryperspective.pdf) So, on this account, you might expect that some music that preceded the imposition of this EYE-based conformity would exhibit more respect for the surround, just as you would expect that some music that followed the relaxing of this *environmental* constraint might also begin to explicitly investigate the *spherical* nature of sound. That is, of course, exactly what seems to have happened! None of which, however, changes the fact that in the electric era -- the first and only media environment which created MASS audiences -- music continued to be largely an expression of the unconscious orientation for perspective (i.e. linear, eye-based, frontal performances), which then became a very conscious part of the commercialization of performances -- in our own living-rooms. It would have to wait for the further shift from *electric* to *digital* media environment for all of this -- both the linearity of Gutenberg and the chaos of modernity -- to begin to appear as arbitrary and merely historical accidents. Now, we are ready for Ambisonics (but not as a mass-market phenomenon) . . . as we all become MEDIEVAL (or, if you prefer, post-modern) once again!! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 4/3/2012 10:44:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, p.len...@derby.ac.uk writes: I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners. In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, relevance. So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical presentation. So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances. Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology University of Derby, UK tel: 01332 593155 e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Malham Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Hi Robert, Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the 16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new concept
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
I agree. My appeal for material to listen to was not intended as a call to get Apple to take over. The blood curdles. Robert On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Marc Lavall?e wrote: I would fear an applelization of ambisonics. Apple could impose its own ok format (probably as a CAF chunk specification) with patents and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my opinion). Ronald C.F. Antony r...@cubiculum.com a ?crit : On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote: Ronald: Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like that would make a difference. Very interesting! Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio (other than on purchased movies)? As best I can tell, they do not. Why would they in the future? No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm not sure what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel layout is dropped into iTunes and the default core-audio device happens to be a multi-channel audio interface. However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple products. e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb, core-audio supports multi-channel and has a standard surround panner that uses Ambisonic theory to achieve its task, etc. CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc. In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing floating around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and application universe that if the right people were convinced, it would not be a massive undertaking to get the basics going, i.e. something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order Horizontal-only-B-Format playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. It's something that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical product cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it, and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might enquire they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order isn't good enough and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them. After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know, and that causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch that what they do isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the equivalent of kicking the hornets nest, because they potentially confuse the average user, and then they get bad press on top, when anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple and they find plenty of people bitching about the crappy, insufficient implementation. The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure. Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a result they are getting nothing ever. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 3 Apr 2012, at 18:03, Marc Lavallée m...@hacklava.net wrote: I would fear an applelization of ambisonics. Apple could impose its own ok format (probably as a CAF chunk specification) with patents and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my opinion). I think that's baseless FUD. Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. So of course, some multi-channel Ambisonic music for sale in the iTunes Store would likely be in some sort of m4a container with some proprietary purchase information chunk, but what do you expect? On the other hand, DRM free formats Apple has a long history of publishing and making available. Apple focuses on where its PRODUCTS have a competitive advantage, and for THOSE THINGS patents the shit out of everything. Underlying mainstream technologies, however, anything from HTML5, networking, the CoreOS, etc. are all based on open standards, published, and often even open source. I see no reason why that would be different with Ambisonic audio. Besides, I really don't care. Right now, the price of admission for a non-tinker setup is north of $40k for a Meridian setup. Comparatively speaking, I don't care if I'm forced to buy an AppleTV for $99 or an iPad or MacMini for $500 as price of admission. There are plenty of patents already in the Ambisonic field, a few more won't hurt, and if a giant like Apple were to enter this market, chances are, they would be able (due to the volume of licensing), to coax the rest of the patent holders to throw all the patents into a pool, like was done for H.264, and license them under FRAND terms as standard essential patents. Everyone would win. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Hi What about Apple lossless compression, Quicktime - and so on? Tony -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Ronald C.F. Antony Sent: 03 April 2012 20:06 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to create a 1st-order CAF file. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented. It is supported in libsndfile (along with AMB), among other things. I might even add it to the CDP m/c toolkit, if anyone is still actually using it. There is no indication they have any interest in providing an in-house codec for B-Format - which would nevertheless be a strong way to establish it in the mainstream'. Those who want Ambisonics to become more widely established (aka mainstream) will need to talk to those who want it to remain a niche process for the cognoscenti. To do the former will by definition require some company or other to support it and present some de-facto standard implementation. If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible. I suspect that if Dolby et al, rather than define a single 5.1 surround format, had proposed umpteen options, arbitrary speaker positions, multiple user options for encoding and decoding, etc, the format would very likely not have been taken up at all. Sometimes choice is a good thing, but sometimes it is not. Every decision an implementer has to take, every option they have either to adopt or disregard, will reduce their enthusiasm for the thing by 50%, progressively. 5.1 is a shoo-in as there is just the one thing to implement, which everyone will use. Even 7.1 is a problem as there are a whopping two alternative layouts around. B-format has so many options and permutations available that the commercial enthusiasm factor will be down to 0.1% or less. So there is absolutely no danger at all of Apple locking in B-Format as it is all but un-lockable. That jelly+tree thing again. What you might get, on the other hand, is a hardware-based turnkey system aimed at a very specific market, such as IOSONO or Immsound, where they tell you only the absolute minimum information required to run the system, and it is probably closed beyond the possibility of opening. Unless of course they publish a file format for it Richard Dobson On 03/04/2012 19:14, Robert Greene wrote: I agree. My appeal for material to listen to was not intended as a call to get Apple to take over. The blood curdles. Robert On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Marc Lavall?e wrote: I would fear an applelization of ambisonics. Apple could impose its own ok format (probably as a CAF chunk specification) with patents and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my opinion). ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
The Apple lossless codec was made open-source last year. Richard Dobson On 03/04/2012 20:26, Rev Tony Newnham wrote: Hi What about Apple lossless compression, Quicktime - and so on? Tony -Original Message- From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Ronald C.F. Antony Sent: 03 April 2012 20:06 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:26, Rev Tony Newnham revtonynewn...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote: What about Apple lossless compression, Quicktime - and so on? Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. Apple Lossless is fully published: http://alac.macosforge.org/ It's reason to exist is that Apple made an engineering choice: that less compute cycles during playback (i.e. battery life on portable devices) is more important than fast compression (which is done only once) or the ultimate in compression ratio (storage gets cheaper, but devices and batteries shrink, so battery life is always going to be a challenge). Again, it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. As a matter of fact, when it comes to standards Apple does more to push them than just about any other force in the market. Others push things like Flash, Quicktime Quicktime was way ahead of its time and actually is the foundation of MPEG4, which has a container format directly based on Quicktime. With the arrival of MP4 Apple pretty much only uses that format, and retains the older versions only for backwards compatibility. All the stuff you find in the iTunes store are now MP4 based, i.e. m4v and m4a, whereby only the DRM is proprietary at the request of the content providers. The container format itself is open and anyone can create and read m4v/m4a files as long as they don't try to use the FairPlay DRM, which is kind of obvious, because if everyone could decode the DRM, there wouldn't be a need for DRM in the first place. and so on? Can't answer that part of the question, because it's not specified in any meaningful way. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 3 Apr 2012, at 22:15, Richard Dobson richarddob...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote: The Apple lossless codec was made open-source last year. Some people might as: why was it not published earlier? To that I'd answer: - legal issues: a company like Apple has huge potential legal liabilities. Before they release something like that into the wild, they make sure there are no relevant patents or other legal issues that could result in massive liabilities for publishing the code - engineering issues: Apple will not publish code they don't deem sufficiently mature and well documented. Sometimes release cycles mandate less than perfect code to get things out the door. You're just not going to publish lousy, quick dirty code. You clean it up, document it, and when it's stable and reasonably bug free, that's the point when you can publish it. - demand: putting something out there requires a minimum amount of effort, support and infrastructure. There's no point in publishing code and incurring all that overhead if there's no demand. Only if there are enough requests for something to be public, there are no legal obstacles, the code is mature enough, and it's not considered a proprietary key competitive advantage over other platforms, things can and will be published. Anyway, we're not here to discuss Apple. I only mentioned Apple because in the past there was once a small chance that they might have picked it up, but it was largely ruined by the purists demands which sent the people from Apple who were lurking on this list to assess the potential running away. Not likely that they'll come back anytime soon... Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote: Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to create a 1st-order CAF file. Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first order, they will have run out by now. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented. On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new. Most of the technology could be challenged because it's a derivative of EA IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even EBU's 64-bit WAV derivative is part of the open, prior art). But at the same time, Apple put in some streaming related indexing into CAF which is new and not as easily contested. As a pirate and someone who criticises those kinds of patents, I don't think they should have been granted. But at the same tiem, I know they have *been* granted, and I know they are likely to stick even if challenged. (The relevant parts are the ones which hint a real time media server about how to deliver RTP-streams. If you filter them out, you're probably safe until Apple decides to sue you on the trivialities and proven art which should have been safe already.) It is supported in libsndfile (along with AMB), among other things. I haven't been following Eric's work as closely as I should have been. Of the two lists I'm on, he's mostly spoken on musicdsp, and not here. Eric, could you tell us a little bit about the patent status of the CAF implementation within libsndfile? And while we're at it, what would be tha chance of getting some newer, purely open source format into the library, if coded by an outside agency? Just in case? There is no indication they have any interest in providing an in-house codec for B-Format - which would nevertheless be a strong way to establish it in the mainstream'. As usual, I can't be relied upon for anything. But I've narrowed down a certain spherical harmonics toolset as something which could be utilized for further ambisonic work, without worrying about the order, library-wise. It comes with a numerical stability proof right upto order 2800, which is to say quite enough. Unfortunately it's written in Fortran, but then it compiles with GCC, using portable libraries like FFTW, LAPACK and BLAS, which we'd need in any case. If I ever get around to finishing the Motherlode, I'm thinking SHTools ( http://shtools.ipgp.fr/ ) and some example code against it would be a terrific addition in the practical, computational front. I mean, obviously having all of the knowledge isn't enough to spread ambisonic around. We do need open API's, libraries, idiot-libraries and all that. If you want people to adopt it, you must first make it idiot-proof. Those who want Ambisonics to become more widely established (aka mainstream) will need to talk to those who want it to remain a niche process for the cognoscenti. The latter part is zilch. None of us who have learnt what the technology is about wants it to remain on the sidelines. Sure, it's nice to talk about it within a little circuit, but none of us, and I repeat *none*, want to have to cobble up ad hoc circuits to listen to the sound, none of us have ever purposefully hindered its mainstream adoption, and then *all* of us really just wonder, why-didn't-it-or-how-to-make-it catch fire for real. No kidding. Ask anybody on-list. While some patent hassles do remain, those have *never* been about overt exploitation of the basic technology. They, too, even as I hate the thing, have been about making a living while developing and promoting the system further. (Mind you, in my time on the list, I've never *ever* met as many helpful and altruistic folks as here. Even with the development of the first stages of the Motherlode. A number of folks have gone to the length of scanning countless boxes of carefully preserved physical documents. That sort of sustained effort doesn't come from profit-mindedness, but from pure love of the elegance of the sound architecture.) To do the former will by definition require some company or other to support it and present some de-facto standard implementation. Today, it might or it might not require that. Nowadays there is the open source circuit as well, you know. It isn't only about a limited number of companies or bureaucratically shelved out government subsidies -- like the National Research and Development Council quango which already burnt the tech once. Now we have other options besides. If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible. Have you ever heard what pantophonic ambisonic, decoded from two channels to four
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote: Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to create a 1st-order CAF file. Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first order, they will have run out by now. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented. On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new. Most of the technology could be challenged because it's a derivative of EA IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even EBU's 64-bit WAV derivative is part of the open, prior art). ?? what patents? You are tilting at windmills. CAF is a file format (more precisely a container format), a standard to be followed, not a device (much less an algorithm) that can be patented. Did you think WAVE was somehow patented? Or XML for that matter? OK, if you put something such as an mp3 stream inside a file, then technically you need a licence to encode/decode it; but there can be no patent attached to a file format per se. See here for all you need to know about CAF (including how to implement it on other platforms). And note it is extensible in just the same way WAVEX is: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAF_intro/CAF_intro.html You can download it as a pdf. You will find no reference to a patent anywhere. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
At 08:49 03/04/2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: Frankly, I have ZERO interest in 2nd and higher-order Ambisonics, because anything beyond a 5.1/4.0 setup is impractical in any home listening environment for 90%+ of consumers, particularly if the speakers and amps are supposed to be of a quality that provide for the homogenous sound field that Ambisonics asks for. An 8.1 home setup with 6 cheesy cardboard surround effects speakers and two decent stereo front speakers isn't going to be enjoyable, and four nice speakers already cost more than most people can afford. I have to agree with this. I have five smallish but decent B W speakers (4 off DM603-S3 and the equivalent center unit) and that cost $2,500, which seems to me to be enough. Add the cost of a decent multichannel power amplifier and DVD/SACD player and that's another $1,500. Stitching it all together I use an RME FF800, which is admittedly slight overkill, but it allows me to play wav files from a laptop in surround. Total investment for what I regard as a fairly modest home system is over $6,000. Not peanuts, even today! David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote: .. So why *not* do it, since it's really, really good even on the minimum four speakers? Good question. The answer is always given that first order is not good enough. The perfect really is the enemy of the good, or the better. You could call it order creep. .. Unless of course they publish a file format for it Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage up. :) Please do! My one (ho ho) mistake with AMB (published 2000) was that is it not extensible (I asked on this list, repeatedly, for what people needed, no response at all); only supports up to third-order. I naively thought that would be enough. I kept it a bit too simple by not adding a version field. And of course for HOA with 24/96 etc it needs a 64bit file format (such as CAF) anyway. Somewhere, people have been (apparently) designing the ultimate handle-everything file format (maybe even using CAF), but as far as I am aware it has not been finalised and published as a formal spec. There was talk of using FLAC, ogg, etc. Everyone argued incessantly about channel naming (people are fed up with WXYZUV etc), ordering, normalization regimes (e.g. getting rid of the traditional 3db scaling on W), embedding decoding coefficients (or was it encoding?) inside the header, all manner of stuff. So I have to wish you good luck... Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 04/04/2012 00:54, Marc Lavallée wrote: The CAF format is not patented, but there are patented file formats like GIF, ASF or PDF. Ah yes, I suppose those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The general issue arises when a file format pretends to be a container format but in fact specifically enshrines patented DRM, compression or other encryption algorithms (e.g GIF because of LZW compression, loads of such things in the monster that was/is ASF). PDF (having moved through a rather large number of versions) is now effectively free and open (now an ISO standard), available on Linux etc. Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 4 Apr 2012, at 01:13, Sampo Syreeni de...@iki.fi wrote: Eric, could you tell us a little bit about the patent status of the CAF implementation within libsndfile? And while we're at it, what would be tha chance of getting some newer, purely open source format into the library, if coded by an outside agency? Just in case? CAF is purely open source, it's 64-bit, it's extensible, it's taggable, and it has provisions such that if your CAF-writing program (e.g. DAW) crashes, you still have a valid/recoverable file until the point in time when the program crashes (which is not the case with most other file formats). So why create more file formats, we have already too many. If not CAF, then use an MP4 container format, just not yet another format, we've got plenty crappy ones already. Rather use something that has already existing infrastructure. If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible. Have you ever heard what pantophonic ambisonic, decoded from two channels to four speakers, can do? Eero Aro was once kind enough to show me that, and it was downright eerie. Even as the very, very limited BHJ version. The setup was nowhere near perfect, the playback came from analog tape, and so on... Yet stuff seemed to come from the sides and behind me. It stayed there as well, when I turned my head. Exactly my point, that's why I'm pissed when the n-th order snobism kills everything from UHJ to G-Format to planar-only B-format. I wished anything beyond that would, for at leas the next decade be clearly marked academic research only, and stay out of the way when it comes to practical applications (except when used as an internal intermediate format within processing modules). There's a good chance that within the next year or two, Amazon and Apple will start selling lossless encoded audio. In Stereo. That means UHJ will be an option. So there. UHJ is all we need, it's good enough for a start. Once people know UHJ, then you can tell them that using a third channel to get to horizontal-only B-format it gets even better. Once that's established in the mainstream you can start talking about Z-axis and higher orders. Not before. Step-by-step. All commercially relevant music is sold essentially stereo only. That means the only thing that's relevant for the near and mid-term is UJH, with binaural and 5.1 (4.0) decoding. Plus maybe 5.1 G-Format for music videos on DVD or surround capable video downloads. Period. Of course it wouldn't have. The difference is that now every piece of real audio hardware has a signal processor inside it. Now, every piece of hardware *and* software can easily, effortlessly and cheaply adapt to the ambisonic viewpoint. First order, it's no more than 20-30 lines of code. So why *not* do it, since it's really, really good even on the minimum four speakers? We can do both of those better than the folks who do them now, discretely. I can promise you that even at first order. No kidding either. :) Why don't the commercial manufacturers do what the early ambisonic decoder makers did, and limit the choices to just two: aspect ratio of the (rectangular) rig, and its mean diameter? I mean, it works spectacularly well regardless of the number of speakers, it's intuitive, and it can be easily generalized to non-ambisonic modes of playback as well. This ain't rocket surgery, you know. That's the realistic attitude I'm missing for the most part around here So there is absolutely no danger at all of Apple locking in B-Format as it is all but un-lockable. Not much, but there is some: if theirs is the only widely spread format which carries B-format, and its ancillary online features are held behind a patent wall, then de facto B-format's only viable distribution channel could be owned by Apple. That'd be a real shame. Not really. Compare to what we have now. Imagine a hypothetical Apple patent wall that gets Ambisonic B-Format limited to the iTunes music store. That's hundreds of millions of users! And what do we have now? A few thousands of enthusiasts and academics. I eat the patent pill to get the tech spread and the content creators on board. The patents expire in less time than has already been wasted and resulted in Ambisonics going nowhere. Thus, where is our open sourced hardware for ambisonic? We used to have something like that in the analogue age. Where is the counterpart of that for the DSP age? :) The problem is: who still needs hardware? Unless it's incorporated into something like an Oppo DVD/BD player, which hooks up directly to a power amp, the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV that gets its data stream from a computer server, i.e. iTunes. At least that's the
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Musichttp://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448*/ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450*/ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /*http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/49f083b7/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote: Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Musichttp://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448*/ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450*/ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /*http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/49f083b7/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
The orchestra may not be around the audience, but the ambience around the audience counts for quite a bit. If we heard a flat, frontal only image in concert, I would guess that even people without any surround sound exposure would find this acceptable. Just because a body isn't behind you, it doesn't mean there isn't sound coming from behind you. Best, Josh On Apr 2, 2012, at 8:34 AM, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote: Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Musichttp://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448*/ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450*/ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /*http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/49f083b7/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ** /* Joshua D. Parmenter http://www.realizedsound.net/josh/ “Every composer – at all times and in all cases – gives his own interpretation of how modern society is structured: whether actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously, he makes choices in this regard. He may be conservative or he may subject himself to continual renewal; or he may strive for a revolutionary, historical or social palingenesis. - Luigi Nono */ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
THis is of course exactly what I said! That surround is good for ambience. That was my whole point in fact--that if ambience is what you want and of course for concert music it is what you want, then Ambisonics with its emphasis on homogeneity is going to a lot of trouble for something that can be done more simply. I am pretty sure everyone understands that an anechoic orchestra sounds odd indeed! The question is how to get ambience effectively in practical terms. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Josh Parmenter wrote: The orchestra may not be around the audience, but the ambience around the audience counts for quite a bit. If we heard a flat, frontal only image in concert, I would guess that even people without any surround sound exposure would find this acceptable. Just because a body isn't behind you, it doesn't mean there isn't sound coming from behind you. Best, Josh On Apr 2, 2012, at 8:34 AM, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote: Right on - as I've said before, frontal music is largely a development of 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now. By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth and Reality in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169). Dave On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote: --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer /*/ /* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */ /* Music Research Centre */ /* Department of Musichttp://music.york.ac.uk/; */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 322448*/ /* Heslington Fax 01904 322450*/ /* York YO10 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /*http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/; */ /*/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/49f083b7/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ** /* Joshua D. Parmenter http://www.realizedsound.net/josh/ ?Every composer ? at all times and in all cases ? gives his own interpretation of how modern society is structured: whether actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously, he makes choices in this regard. He may be conservative or he may subject himself to continual renewal; or he may strive for a revolutionary, historical or social palingenesis. - Luigi Nono */ ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 02/04/2012 16:34, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. Maybe; but acoustic concert music is not the universe. But I can well see that the prevailing assumption on this list is that Ambisonics is only relevant to the reproduction of traditional music formats and idioms (yawn). Implication - composers trying to compose new sounds which do surround the audience should look elsewhere - or perhaps not bother at all? The spectacle of seeing people on this list for ever trying to promote this new system in terms of existing music, when stereo is actually good enough for that material already, is more than a little disconcerting. If it of any interest whatsoever to this list: last year Trevor Wishart completed a new 8-channel surround work Encounters in the Republic of Heaven. Reviews to date collectively suggest this work is very likely (a) a masterpiece and (b) universally accessible, e.g.: http://www.thebubble.org.uk/music/encounters-during-the-republic-of-heaven Needless to say he wrote a number of new software tools for CDP to manage his audio routing. Now, I ~could~ quietly suggest that he might consider a mix for 5.1 delivery using B-Format (currently all that is available to buy is a stereo mixdown), but if everyone sticks rigidly to the notion that music only exists in front, I see no point in trying. So, what ~is~ the point of this list, exactly? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Part of the point must surely be to reach the public eventually? Or is that somehow sort of declasse? Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Richard Dobson wrote: On 02/04/2012 16:34, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. Maybe; but acoustic concert music is not the universe. But I can well see that the prevailing assumption on this list is that Ambisonics is only relevant to the reproduction of traditional music formats and idioms (yawn). Implication - composers trying to compose new sounds which do surround the audience should look elsewhere - or perhaps not bother at all? The spectacle of seeing people on this list for ever trying to promote this new system in terms of existing music, when stereo is actually good enough for that material already, is more than a little disconcerting. If it of any interest whatsoever to this list: last year Trevor Wishart completed a new 8-channel surround work Encounters in the Republic of Heaven. Reviews to date collectively suggest this work is very likely (a) a masterpiece and (b) universally accessible, e.g.: http://www.thebubble.org.uk/music/encounters-during-the-republic-of-heaven Needless to say he wrote a number of new software tools for CDP to manage his audio routing. Now, I ~could~ quietly suggest that he might consider a mix for 5.1 delivery using B-Format (currently all that is available to buy is a stereo mixdown), but if everyone sticks rigidly to the notion that music only exists in front, I see no point in trying. So, what ~is~ the point of this list, exactly? Richard Dobson ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Incidentally, I may come across as interested only in classical music(true) but popular music is the same way. Anyone watch the Country Music awards show(you cannot get more grass roots popular than that). See a lot of country music singers doing antiphonal calling from all over the auditorium? Or did you see a bunch of people on stage in front? I did not watch myself, but if there were a lot of the former I would be amazed. Spatial music has a place in the world, just as does 12 tone row music and aleatoric music and a lot of other things that came and went(12 tone did pretty well for itself for a while, but times change). But most music is still in front. And it is likely to stay there. Whatever one thinks of how things ought to be, if a system is ever going to enter the mainstream , it needs to be offering something that lots of people want. Stereo took off because it sounded enough better that people did not mind the doubling up of everything. Personally I think that some sort of surround is worthwhile, because one likes feeling immersed, if only in ambience. Ambisonics is probably the best way to do this. Or maybe not. But my point is that the general public is not given a chance to find out! And offbeat recordings of peculiar music that not very many people will ever hear is not how one is going to reach the public. Wny don't Ambisonics people do show demos? Robert ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Richard: So, what ~is~ the point of this list, exactly? To discuss the opportunity to PLAY with *sound* with our friends in a DIGITAL world! Mass-markets (i.e. programming large numbers of people who you will never know) come from a different era -- the electric media era *before* computers came to dominate our environment. The LIST only exists because of *computers* and so does current Ambisonics practice. We are *digital* now and no longer *analog/electrical* , , , We are not in KANSAS anymore (for those not familiar with Americanisms, this means that we live in a completely different world now from the 1920s or 1950s)! We are so poorly equipped to understand these sorts of changes in our environment and the impact that they have on us, that some people actually believe that Facebook has an audience of 800 million people. It doesn't. I has many, many thousands of SMALL groups (typically of dozens to around a hundred people each), which overlap and extend in a myriad of ways. There is no MASS audience on Facebook -- which is why it will ultimately fail as an advertising-driven investment for many who make the mistake of not just speculating on its rise-and-fall. Expecting that Ambisonics would participate in a MASS *media* phenomenon when the world is aggressively moving *away* from ANY activities of this sort is to fundamentally misunderstand the times in which we live. The failure isn't in the Ambisonics people or in the technology -- what is happening is entirely appropriate for our times. Small *is* BEAUTIFUL . . . so we might as well admit it and enjoy ourselves! g Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/595f5771/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
This sounds plausible except that it is clearly completely wrong. Hunger Games has grossed about one quarter billion dollars in a few weeks worldwide. Don't talk about small taking over! Small is there, all right. But large is still there, too. Taylor Swift's Speak Now sold over a million in the first week. But it did not sell in Ambisonic format. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote: Richard: So, what ~is~ the point of this list, exactly? To discuss the opportunity to PLAY with *sound* with our friends in a DIGITAL world! Mass-markets (i.e. programming large numbers of people who you will never know) come from a different era -- the electric media era *before* computers came to dominate our environment. The LIST only exists because of *computers* and so does current Ambisonics practice. We are *digital* now and no longer *analog/electrical* , , , We are not in KANSAS anymore (for those not familiar with Americanisms, this means that we live in a completely different world now from the 1920s or 1950s)! We are so poorly equipped to understand these sorts of changes in our environment and the impact that they have on us, that some people actually believe that Facebook has an audience of 800 million people. It doesn't. I has many, many thousands of SMALL groups (typically of dozens to around a hundred people each), which overlap and extend in a myriad of ways. There is no MASS audience on Facebook -- which is why it will ultimately fail as an advertising-driven investment for many who make the mistake of not just speculating on its rise-and-fall. Expecting that Ambisonics would participate in a MASS *media* phenomenon when the world is aggressively moving *away* from ANY activities of this sort is to fundamentally misunderstand the times in which we live. The failure isn't in the Ambisonics people or in the technology -- what is happening is entirely appropriate for our times. Small *is* BEAUTIFUL . . . so we might as well admit it and enjoy ourselves! g Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/595f5771/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On 2 Apr 2012, at 20:53, newme...@aol.com wrote: But, in the context of this list and this thread, these larger forces must also be taken into account -- which, ultimately, lead to the perfectly understandable reasons why Ambisonics could never and should never become a mass-market technology. I tend to disagree, because there is a difference between technology and content. I totally agree that content mass-market is ever less dominant, because the digital age allows for efficient internetworking of sub-cultures, and therefore their ability of carving out niches that collectively eat away at once dominant mass-culture. However, just as much as MP3 and ripping of audio destroyed the mass-market of LP/CD sales, the massmarket of MP3 players and MP3 files still was created. Ambisonics would have the role of MP3, not the role of prerecorded music sales from record stores. The key thing would be to get a major player to include Ambisonics in their line up, and that isn't happening as long as the purists bitch and whine about how at least 2nd, better 3rd order Ambisonics is a must, because the complexities and channel count just don't justify the effort given that there is no proven demand. Something like UHJ, except for being tied to CDs, and G-Format (with an ability to extract B-Format for transcoding into different speaker layouts, but en inherent 5.1 compatibility) are the only meaningful choices when attempting to popularize Ambisonics, but both of these are sneered at by the very experts that would have to be cooperating with industry heavyweights to get things off the ground. For these reasons, snobbery and academic purity, Ambisonics won't go anywhere in the next three decades, unless there's a major shift in attitude. Some people still don't understand that one doesn't feed a baby with a steak. Get things going, and when there's a certain amount of market penetration and people start noticing limitations THEN you can tell them about 2nd and 3rd order, because by then the concept has sunk in and people say: I want the better version of what I already have. Did Apple wait until they can ship a universal LTE Retina-Display iPhone and iPad? No, we're on the fifth generation iPhone, and still not there. But some people here are not interested in any solution unless it's a perfect solution, and that unrealistic thinking is the biggest roadblock to progress. And then, of course, another problem with Ambisonics is, that it's British... ...and the entertainment industry is US-American, and consumer electronics (aside from Apple) is Japanese-Korean, made in China/Vietnam. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Ronald: I tend to disagree, because there is a difference between technology and content. Ah but we AGREE! Sorry to be (partly) cliched here but consider the *full* statement -- the medium is the message . . . and the USER is the content! That second part is almost always left off -- because it doesn't work as a slogan and can't be so easily mass-marketed (literally). What it means is just that WE are changed by the technologies that we use *regardless* of the content. It is the process of using/participating in-and-with these new technologies that changes our behaviors and attitudes -- as once happened with books, and then with radio/television and now with the Internet (and many other technologies along the way) -- which then changes what is possible in the market. We are all changed by becoming Internet-savvy and computer-literate -- compared to the average person of our interests and aptitudes from the 1950s/60s. It is those changes in US that makes the notion of introducing a *new* living-room type of audio reproduction with mass-market appeal so completely implausible today. No whiz-bang demos will make any difference! Ambisonics is what people are doing on this list and that's just as it should be -- PLAYING with *sound* with our friends! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 4/2/2012 4:22:15 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, r...@cubiculum.com writes: On 2 Apr 2012, at 20:53, newme...@aol.com wrote: But, in the context of this list and this thread, these larger forces must also be taken into account -- which, ultimately, lead to the perfectly understandable reasons why Ambisonics could never and should never become a mass-market technology. I tend to disagree, because there is a difference between technology and content. I totally agree that content mass-market is ever less dominant, because the digital age allows for efficient internetworking of sub-cultures, and therefore their ability of carving out niches that collectively eat away at once dominant mass-culture. However, just as much as MP3 and ripping of audio destroyed the mass-market of LP/CD sales, the massmarket of MP3 players and MP3 files still was created. Ambisonics would have the role of MP3, not the role of prerecorded music sales from record stores. The key thing would be to get a major player to include Ambisonics in their line up, and that isn't happening as long as the purists bitch and whine about how at least 2nd, better 3rd order Ambisonics is a must, because the complexities and channel count just don't justify the effort given that there is no proven demand. Something like UHJ, except for being tied to CDs, and G-Format (with an ability to extract B-Format for transcoding into different speaker layouts, but en inherent 5.1 compatibility) are the only meaningful choices when attempting to popularize Ambisonics, but both of these are sneered at by the very experts that would have to be cooperating with industry heavyweights to get things off the ground. For these reasons, snobbery and academic purity, Ambisonics won't go anywhere in the next three decades, unless there's a major shift in attitude. Some people still don't understand that one doesn't feed a baby with a steak. Get things going, and when there's a certain amount of market penetration and people start noticing limitations THEN you can tell them about 2nd and 3rd order, because by then the concept has sunk in and people say: I want the better version of what I already have. Did Apple wait until they can ship a universal LTE Retina-Display iPhone and iPad? No, we're on the fifth generation iPhone, and still not there. But some people here are not interested in any solution unless it's a perfect solution, and that unrealistic thinking is the biggest roadblock to progress. And then, of course, another problem with Ambisonics is, that it's British... ...and the entertainment industry is US-American, and consumer electronics (aside from Apple) is Japanese-Korean, made in China/Vietnam. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120402/77f37212/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
At 10:34 02/04/2012, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. We are not talking about concerts, but about recordings... Why should one imitate the other? And as far as most symphony concerts in the USA go, they as close to a 19th century artform as one could imagine. David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Two weeks ago, I saw a performance of Répons by Boulez. It was a canadian première, 30 years after its creation. The audience surrounded the orchestra, and six percussion instruments surrounded the audience, along with 6 speakers. It was happening in a very large room (an old boat factory), so there was an incredible mix of close and distant sounds. I saw many other concerts with instruments and sounds surrounding the audience, with music from John Cage, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and even Schubert. It may not be common, but it does exist, so we should expect some more surround recordings in a not so distant future. One of the most interesting 5.0 recordings I heard is the Virtual Haydn project, that recreates the acoustic experience of small concert halls of the 18th century. David Pickett d...@fugato.com a écrit: At 10:34 02/04/2012, Robert Greene wrote: It may be old but it is still all but universal in acoustic concert music. I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not. How many symphony concerts have you been to recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience. The other way around, sure. But I think this is just not true, that music with the musicians around the audience is common. Not in the statistical sense of percentage of concerts where it happens. We are not talking about concerts, but about recordings... Why should one imitate the other? And as far as most symphony concerts in the USA go, they as close to a 19th century artform as one could imagine. David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound -- Tous les hommes prennent les limites de leur champ visuel pour les limites du monde. Arthur Schopenhauer ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
[Sursound] OT: Spatial music
--On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Of course music exists that is not in front. But the vast bulk of concert music is not like that. Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Paul -- Paul Hodges ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
On Sun, April 1, 2012 5:20 am, Paul Hodges wrote: Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce properly? My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it becomes spatially interesting, generally. You mentioned Gabrieli and Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from different parts of the hall. Not all within the restricted form of concert music, but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our whole environment. Thank you, Paul. I've been a member of this group for several years and generally skim the messages as most threads focus on face-forward listening and 3D illusions. As a composer, I have written acoustic and electroacoustic (plus 'soundwalks') that surround the listener for years (my first such piece was composed in 1972). I'd love to hear more discussion of producing convincing surround music and environments, especially effective plug-ins using multitrack electroacoustic sources in programs like Adobe Audition. The last time I asked (a few years ago) I was told such things exist but are very expensive and the topic was dropped. Dennis ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
Hi A pity the website is not easier to navigate Yes, they have made it as difficult as possible.. Here is a more clear site of the Immortal Nysted record: http://www.2l.musiconline.no/shop/displayAlbum.asp?id=29968 The last track, Immortal Bach is one of the best 5.0 recordings I have ever heard. The stereo prewiew doesn't do right to the complete piece in surround. Eero ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound