Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
PS Leaving my own evaluation aside, one of the things I have noticed about this type of recording is that there is a direct connection between how much people like it and how familiar they are with the actual sound of the particular orchestra in the particular hall. I did not have contact with the people in St Petersburg after the fact --except for the musicians. But in Philadelphia I got a lot of feedback from people who were going regularly to the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts in the Academy of Music(where they were performing at the time, Verizon not being in existence at that point). People would call me up out of the blue and rave on about how perfectly the sound of the Orchestra and the Academy was captured on the recording, about how it sounded just like their concert experience. And the members of the regular audience bought the recording like crazy--we sold all 10,000 that we were allowed to make under the contract we had, many , maybe most, to local people. The musicians also carried on about how they at last had a recording where they could recognize their colleagues' playing, that did not make them sound like a generic orchestra, without the real identity of their sound preserved. On the other hand, people who did not know what the orchestra sounded like and did not care but wanted the recording to sound the way commercial recordings are usually messed with to sound were not impressed or interested so much. There is a deep gulf between people who listen for what they want (usually a kind of commercial artificial generic sound) and what really happens in the actual event. We were trying in all cases to get the latter. And I think we did to the extent that that is possible. I do not particularly like the Academy of Music acoustically. Too dry for me. But I spent a lot of time there and learned its sound well. Listen to the recording and there it is. Love it or not, it is what was there, to a surprising extent. In short, the recording of reality via Blumlein really works if you do it well. Whether people want the reality is another story. It seems that mostly the people that experience the reality often enough to recognize it really want it. Others just want something that sounds like everything else they listen to. Or at least many of them do. Not all however. Arnie Nudell, founder of Infinity, for example called the WaterLily Mahler 5 a benchmark for all future orchestral recording. Depend on who you ask, I guess. Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Robert Greene wrote: Sorry you don't like it. Apparently you do not like the sound of the St Petersburg orchestra since of course we did absolutely nothing to alter the balances. Maybe you have never heard them, or maybe you are used to hearing recordings that boost the violins up by miking them separately(which lots of recordings do). Brass instruments are way loud. They do tend to drown out the violins in reality. I should know: I am a violinist in a professional orchestra and when the brass blasts away, yes, we violinists feel drowned out and are. Moreover, the trumpets in St Petersburg sit out front. So they are close to the audience. Meanwhile, this is seventh row. The trumpets are in fact loud there. It is the style of the orchestra. Take it or leave it--but it is surely not the fault of the recording. But in the Adagietto , there are no such problems if problems they seem to you. If you do not like that,,,well, breathes there a man with soul so dead... The balance was not up to us. We just recorded what Temirkanv and his musicians produced. That was the idea--the real sound, something that of course is seldom found in recordings. As to not liking the surround, I could hardly disagree more. I think it sounds dandy and very realistic. One gets a lot of ambience and cannot hear the rear channels as separate sources--which is a lot more than one can say for most surround orchestral recordings. To my ears, modesty aside, on an accurate system, the surround version sounds more like a real orchestral concert than any other recording I am aware of. I just love it, even if I do say so myself. But leaving the surround aside, the stereo balance is what was there. How do you imagine we could have changed it since the stereo is just the unaltered Blumlein feed? If you do not like the balance, complain to Maestro Temirkanov. Not that I suppose he will be very interested... Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, David Pickett wrote: At 12:42 02/04/2012, Robert Greene wrote: Incidentally you do not need to build a concert hall to record at one point. Try the WaterLily/St Petersburg/ Mahler 5 recording--pure Blumlein, sounds wonderful (conflict of interest statement: I did the surround sound part of this myself. But the stereo alone sounds great--and one can definitely hear the violas). Much as I am an adherent of pure Blumlein (and dislike the sound of ORTF), and have made several CDs using a single figure of eight pair, I cannot
Re: [Sursound] Transient time differences
On 04/02/2012 08:37 PM, Eric Benjamin wrote: I believe that the glockenspiel effect that you describe arises because the localization cues experienced by the listener are different for ITDs than for ILDs. Because we primarily rely on ITDs at low frequencies and ILDs at high frequencies, if the reproduction system doesn't handle them in the same way then the listener experiences a disparity. This happens in both Blumlein stereo and in Ambisonics. at the risk of eternal damnation: if you want to fix this in stereo, you can. the solution is called ORTF, NOS, or any other slight variation thereof :-D incidentally, higher-order panned sources are also way more stable with respect to timbre. and now: duck, and cover :) -- Jörn Nettingsmeier Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487 Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio) Tonmeister VDT http://stackingdwarves.net ___ 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] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
Message: 3 Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2012 09:21:21 -0700 (PDT) From: Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu Subject: Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? To: Surround Sound discussion group sursound@music.vt.edu Message-ID: alpine.lnx.2.00.1204020914100.6...@walnut.math.ucla.edu Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII Re marketing I am not a marketing expert but it seems to me that if anyone had really wanted Ambisonics to succeed, there would have been 1 presentations at shows for example. I have over the years encountered exactly one, by Meridian. Period. And Its a question of when you are talking about. There were many presentations in the 70's in US and Europe, but at the time there was very little consumer surround sound around; Dolby stereo and logic decoders was about it. At the time (2 ch UHJ) Ambisonics was criticised for not being like a logic decoded Dolby Stereo. By the BBC. 2 there would have been low priced or free demo discs mixed to 5 channels. Zero on that one. At the time BTG was promoting ambisonics there were no 5 channel discs! 3 Ads for said discs in audio and home theater magazines zero on that one 4 attempts to get magazines to write about it, The Absolute Sound, Stereophile, etc. Pretty much zero on that one, too. look further back into late 70's, early 80's. 5 Demonstrations at shows of Trifield and four speaker frontal stereo. Pretty much zero on that one, too, except for Meridian occasionally. Trifield (Productions) has never had the budget to do much of that; audio was always peripheral to our business. Our involvement came through my earlier work with MAG. I financed his patents on the multispeaker decoder and also built him some prototypes and gave him some expenses to go to AES conventions. Meridian gave a lot more exposure to 'Trifield' than we could have achieved on our own. One really gets the strong impression that the Ambisonics community has never seriously tried for public attention, and perhaps did not even want it. Well, you said it, 'community'. As with the hard-core on Sursound now, we all come at it from different perspectives. There is no agreement about what we want to achieve, and why should there be? In commercial terms it would still be uphill to get Ambisonics into consumer equipment. Basically, you have to get through a connection called HDMI. This is limited to 8 channels which have moronic speaker location predications. It is really not too late at least for Trifield. If it is really better, people would respond. (Actually at a Meridian demo I heard, I thought it sounded worse than stereo. For one thing, the speakers were not far enough apart so that it sounded too mono--this sort of thing does not help the cause). It happens. I remember seeing one very successful Ambisonic demonstration on four speakers where one (rear) speaker was later found to be unplugged. If this is really a better way to play stereo in the sense that people like it better, one could demonstrate. People go to audio shows partly looking for interesting new ideas. But Trifield is one they practically never encounter. This stuff is not hard to set up. It does not even cost very much. But it never seems to happen. It is not easy to do for those who are most likely to appreciate it ie. those who normally listen to a system based on two decent speakers fed by a decent stereo amp! Geoffrey Robert ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
I have to agree with this - at least, to some extent. One of the best recordings, in the sense of most enjoyable to me when I listened back to it, I ever did with the York Waits was one of the ones we did at the marvellous Bossal Church near York. It had to my ears a perfect balance of the acoustic of the space to the sound of the musicians...all down to the musicians, not me, I hasten to add. But...when it went to the record company they insisted on sticking additional, cheesy, reverb on it 'cos that's what our customers want. Yuck :-( Dave On 2 April 2012 17:48, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: I agree completely. The elephant in the room of audio and the reproduction of music is that in fact most people do not seem to WANT music at home that sounds like music in concerts. They say they do, but in practice they have been conditioned-- or perhaps they are just like that--to want something else. In the case of opera, the singers themselves want something different. They want mikes on THEMSELVES, individual mikes. Violinists can be like that too. I read a quote once from Perlman in response to an interviewer raising the question of whether he did not find one of his concerto recordings somewhat over balanced towards the violin He said(approx) My fans do not want to hear the orchestra, they want to hear me. Singers are typically even worse on this, But personally I find opera to sound far better in a naturally done recording. If you can find one. One of the great things about Soundfield microphone recordings is that they are almost guaranteed to be more natural sounding than others because they are made from one point. RCAF is exactly right here. One listens from one spot. This is why something like the Unicorn Fenby Legacy Soundfield orchestral recording sounds so wonderful: it sounds as an orchestra sounds when you are there, and of course in one spot. Hardly anything is sillier than the idea that several locations of microphones separated by four or five meters can somehow be put together in a simple way to sound like real sound. Talk about all the King's horses and all the King's men putting Humpty together again... Robert On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aro eero@dlc.fi wrote: Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good balance with one point miking. Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT. IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where people in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then that means there is a spot for single-point recording. Recording the sound field at that spot should be equivalent of recording the listening experience of a person sitting in that spot, and if the resulting recording is decoded binaurally and played back over head phones, the listener should hear what he would have heard sitting in that spot. Listeners in the opera house don't bounce back and forth between various seats during the performance to adjust which singer is singing where on stage. If the singer can't fill the room appropriately with his voice, then either the room acoustics, or the singer suck (or both), and in either case there's no need to make a recording of such an even anyway. So for real performances, single point micing, even though not a must, should be adequate or superior for all events that are recorded in a venue in which a live audience is supposed to have a good listening experience of an equivalent performance. If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone, recording methodology, or both. The key benefit of ambisonic mixing is to synthesize events that didn't exist in a real acoustic space, but that are supposed to create a virtual reality. 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 -- 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] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)
So I am nervously edging towards the following conclusions : 1. Music can be mixed ambisonically and then decoded or bounced down to Speaker configurations like 5.1, 7.1 ,1100.12 , stereo whatever. 2. This can all be done with software - there is no need for specialist decoders or hardware - making it more a tool for mixing than a product that needs to be marketed to the public. 3. it is not going to be the best solution always - sometimes VBAP might be a better option it will work better for different things. 4. More composers are starting to look at ambisonics though there is still some resistance to it , mainly I think because its hard to get your head around. I'm still trying to work out why stereo diffusion into multiple speakers is more popular to many composers than ambisonics and multichannel mixing I think ambisonics is really going to come into its own now as more software becomes available and new cinema setups are in the pipeline - I think now is quite an exciting time for ambisonics. ___ 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] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
On 3 Apr 2012, at 07:31, Jörn Nettingsmeier netti...@stackingdwarves.net wrote: On 04/02/2012 06:33 PM, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aroeero@dlc.fi wrote: Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good balance with one point miking. Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT. IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where people in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then that means there is a spot for single-point recording. snip If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone, recording methodology, or both. a) putting a microphone into the audience is pretty much impossible for live situations, unless you are more interested in the respiratory functions of your seat neighbors than in the music. flying a soundfield high above makes for a nice horizontal blend of the music, but gives irritating height information. I understand that, which is why I made the snide remark about ticket sales. To place an microphone at audience level, one would have to empty enough seats around the mic position to make neighbors a non-issue. But revenues trump everything. Similarly, they could do a recording while doing final rehearsal, since there's no guarantee what ends up being the better performance anyway (and generally I could deal just fine without the disturbing applause in my living room, random coughing, and other stuff that comes with live events (like air conditioners kicking in because the collective body heat raised the temperatures too high, etc.) b) the listening room acoustics need to be factored into the equation. which is why the usual approach is to get the microphones way high, and to record in really large rooms - you are shifting the early reflections into a range where they are not perceived as coloration, but as echoes. a best seat in the audience kind of recording has its own set of coloring early reflections already, and it is very sensitive to listening room influence. (i guess the reason is our brain can sort out one set of ERs as natural and work around the coloration, but not two sets.) Personally, I have never thought that to be an issue with the recordings I did for friends. The microphone is somewhat elevated, because I usually have it on a stand, with the mic head at about the level of a tall person standing up, so not quite seat level, but certainly a realistic height, and not lift-off level. Either the problem is more imagined by people doing A-B comparisons rather than just going for a enjoyable, plausibily-realistic-sounding sound, or the amount of elevation above seat level required is much less than mainstream recording practice suggests. Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
I understand that, which is why I made the snide remark about ticket sales. To place an microphone at audience level, one would have to empty enough seats around the mic position to make neighbors a non-issue. But revenues trump everything. Similarly, they could do a recording while doing final rehearsal, since there's no guarantee what ends up being the better performance anyway (and generally I could deal just fine without the disturbing applause in my living room, random coughing, and other stuff that comes with live events (like air conditioners kicking in because the collective body heat raised the temperatures too high, etc.) Oh, but the labour of transporting 100 manequins in fur coats into the concert hall to get the acoustics right. Much better to hope the concert attracts the correct socio- economic class ( ... mink ... ) ... and the hall is cold enough that they keep them on. Mind you with anti-fur campaigns spreading to continental Europe we all may be finished soon ;-)) Michael ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:21, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote: Oh, but the labour of transporting 100 manequins in fur coats into the concert hall to get the acoustics right. Much better to hope the concert attracts the correct socio- economic class ( ... mink ... ) ... and the hall is cold enough that they keep them on. Mind you with anti-fur campaigns spreading to continental Europe we all may be finished soon ;-)) Come on, some shaggy-rug seat covers sound just fine, available at every low-class auto parts store ;D 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
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 -- 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 _ The University of Derby has a published policy regarding email and reserves the right to monitor email traffic. If you believe this email was sent to you in error, please notify the sender and delete this email. Please direct any concerns to info...@derby.ac.uk. ___ 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/20120403/3448f07b/attachment.html ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
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] POA/HOA vs 5.1
On Apr 1, 2012, at 9:51 PM, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: On 04/01/2012 09:05 PM, Augustine Leudar wrote: again to anyone who says things like ambisonics cant compete with 5.1 please bear in mind this is like saying amplitude panning can't compete with 5.1 - it doesnt make any sense at all. You mix your tracks horizontally ,without elevation, using ambisonics plugins and burn your ac3/dts file like any other surround mix. higher order ambisonics can compete. first order cannot. Using a matrix-based decoding, I would agree with you about first order, but my experience is that decoding using Harpex leads to quite convincing and robust results. Cheers, Trond ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
/20120403/3448f07b/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
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] Blumlein versus ORTF
Thanks everybody for the links and in particular the calculation of models link. I shall work on that one I know the Lipshitz paper well, but it seems that experts disagree. James Johnston has told me a number of times for example that he thinks getting those time cues from ORTF is really important and that pure Blumlein is really not the way to go because they are missing. So... in this corner expert 1, Stanley L and in the opposite corner expert 2 ,JJ. What's a body to do? Thanks again Robert ___ 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] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
At 14:01 02/04/2012, Aaron Heller wrote: I put some files at http://ambisonics.dreamhosters.com/DTS/ I downloaded, cut onto CD and listened to the finale of Brahms I, which I have conducted several times (where was this recorded?). It is the first time I have heard 4.0 from a CD and for some reason it took me a long time to establish a volume level. The wide dynamic range is nice. The instrumental timbres are realistic, and it is terrific to hear the applause from all around -- something that one unfortunately doesnt get with the DVD recordings of the Sylvester concert from the Musikverein. The image seemed stable. The worst aspect was the distortion (most noticeable just after Letter N from 12:10), which I take to be the 16-bit granularity. I will listen to more of these. Thanks! David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)
On 04/03/2012 03:16 PM, Augustine Leudar wrote: 4. More composers are starting to look at ambisonics though there is still some resistance to it , mainly I think because its hard to get your head around. I'm still trying to work out why stereo diffusion into multiple speakers is more popular to many composers than ambisonics and multichannel mixing that is a phenomenon i haven't been able to figure out either :) why do people still fall for the BEAST? jörn (with apologies to the birmingham crew ;) -- Jörn Nettingsmeier Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487 Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio) Tonmeister VDT http://stackingdwarves.net ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
