Hello Conor, Many thanks for writing. Your email gets at the heart of the second installment of my Sursound Saga (Part II of the diatribe is in work). Yes, I had definitely considered a couple of surround mic options. I am relatively new to Ambisonics and auralization and, not too long ago, I had more than a few naive notions. I had considered the Holophone, spaced miking, the Eigenmic, a Soundfield mic, and even the possibility of affixing a circular array of Pressure Zone Mics (Crown PZM) on a cylindrical support column located inside a nearby open-court restaurant. I did a lot of reading on beamforming--I believe my first source of info on this topic was the Handbook of Signal Processing in Acoustics (Havelock, Kuwano, and Vorlander, Editors; Springer 2008). [Great book, but retails for a lot of $$.]. By the way, you had kindly sent me some product info regarding the RealSpace audio camera. You had sent the pdf brochure to me more than a month ago, and I had meant to contact you. I was quite curious as to the hardware needed (or included) to manage a 64-channel mic array (I'll write to your personal address with more questions). Recordings could certainly be adapted to the existing R-Space, but I am particularly interested in constructing a more 'open' loudspeaker arrangement so that listeners aren't sandwiched between speakers in an already-crowded audiometric test booth. One person on my doc committee is William (Bill) Yost--I'm going to pass your info along to him. His research facility is being renovated. Right now, Bill's awaiting the installation of a rotating chair to be used for balance studies (USAF funded research). The installers will also be adding a semi-hemispherical array of speakers (roughly akin to the setup used at Wright Patterson AFB, but only half a dome will be used). I'm not exactly sure what types of acoustical stimuli will be presented, but the study does involve a surround of sound.
For my work, I have explored a plethora of surround IRs needed to generate my own stimuli from dry recordings. My budget (as well as limited brain power) dictates what tools I choose and ultimately use. I'll write more in my upcoming installment about how I've generated a surround of cocktail party (multi-talker) speech for use as background noise. By adding 'natural' reverb (e.g. Waves IRs recorded via a Soundfield mic), I can do a bit better than my original notion of creating reverb via ray tracing techniques in MATLAB.I'm also making live recordings, both for fun and research purposes. My current arsenal of recording gear includes a TetraMic (and matching preamps), a TASCAM D-680 recorder, a Roland R-4 Pro recorder, and a MOTU 896HD audio interface (mostly used for playback). Anyway, I'd certainly like to learn more about your products. Thanks again for the info. Kind regards, Eric ________________________________ From: Conor Mulvey <cono...@visisonics.com> To: Eric Carmichel <e...@elcaudio.com> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2012 8:24 AM Subject: Re: [Sursound] E's Sursound Saga, Part I--Why what I do wrong works Eric, Interesting "diatribe." I am by no means an acoustician but I wondered if you had considered using a spherical microphone array with beamforming to record speech-test background noise for the R-Space system? It could certainly provide you with a quiet coffee house, a noisy airport terminal and other content quickly. In the interest of full disclosure, I do work for VisiSonics and we are proponents of head tracking and HRTFs but we do also have a spherical microphone array that we build, use and sell. Using beamforming, we have recorded environments for speaker arrays. Just a thought, Conor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20121015/628744d7/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
