January 29, 2025
This has been a tremendously fun and productive day spent with Therese Næss Diesen, James Welburn and Stein Tore Sønsteli at Lillehammer Kino, exploring and playing with the Dolby Atmos system in Sal 4, as part of an ongoing artistic research project at Universitetet i Innlandet. Today, we did stuff that I have been dreaming of since Dolby Atmos launched in 2012, and the day went far beyond expectations.
Sal 4 is one of a few mixing theatres for full-scale theatrical Atmos in Norway. Usually, this is done by bringing a ProTools session loaded onto a workstation on the site. We managed to connect my laptop to Dante so that I could run the system from there. We went on to do technical tests and listening tests to better understand the format. Quite a few discoveries I was not aware of beforehand, and I have not seen anything in writing on them, although they might be known among professionals working with the format on a regular basis.
One significant find was a workflow using ambisonics as an intermediate format for content development towards Atmos. Sound sources might not be localised exactly where specified in the encoded ambisonics signal, but we got really nice-sounding results.
The second part of the day was spent listening to and tuning a composition by James Welburn. If I remember correctly, it was initially mixed for Atmos by Frank of House in Copenhagen. This session illuminated important differences between authoring approaches for theatrical reproduction and home theatre.
We will continue tomorrow.
January 25, 2025
I am checking out plugdata, an open-source visual programming environment for audio experimentation, prototyping and education.
plugdata is based on Pure Data, but the interface, revamped using Juce, looks a lot nicer.
More importantly, plugdata can be used as a VST plugin in various DAW programs, bringing patching opportunities to Reaper in a similar way to how Max can be used with Live.
January 15, 2025
I just received the book that concludes and documents the ViViFiCar project, including my residency in Poço do Canto in Mêda in 2022 and the resulting installation presented there.
A big thanks to everyone who made this possible. I have the best memories, and part of my heart is still left behind in that parish, one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited.
July 7, 2024
In 2016, Peter Meanwell and I did sound design for the Albanian Pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennal of Architecture.
Over the past few days I have retrieved the original sound files and remixed them in Dolby Atmos. The next step is to render and assemble into an album, as an excuse to become aquinted with Dolby Atmos Album Assembler. I do not have the permission to publish and distribute this material, but it is a nice excersise on the way towards being able to publish original immersive material on Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon.
May 3, 2024
Persistent Disequilibrium
by Pixels.Frames.Beats.Drones
Rosendal Teater, Trondheim, as part of Meta.Morf.
Friday 3. May 19:00
Saturday 4. May 19:00
Open exhibition Saturday 12:00 – 16:00 with artist talk at 15:00
What do environmental disasters, weather systems and psychological processes have in common? They are all chaotic systems. They are all processes that, when they are set in motion – even if something can be influenced – live their own lives. They are processes that cannot be stopped, and not least they create ripple effects beyond themselves.
This is the starting point for the artists behind the work Persistent Disequilibrium when they use new materials and techniques to create new instruments, expressions and images in an interaction that visually and sonically becomes a magically beautiful and almost geological exploration.
Don’t let the title scare you; trust the experience. How can sound set off a chain of events for everyday things like salt, flour, spices, paint pigment, coal, grain, pebbles and leaves? Can a soup of magnets give us the experience of standing in a lava field? Can things – set in motion – at different stations in a theatre almost become their own living ecosystem?
The group behind Persistent Disequilibrium works with ideas about resonance, vibration, circuits, reuse, field recording, perception (how we perceive something), and exploration of available material. The performance revolves around material exploration of feedback systems.
The work can be understood both as a performance and as an exhibition, through the fact that scenographic elements that emerge in the performance create a space that is left for the audience to explore afterwards.
April 22, 2024
DBAP dsp working from Trond Lossius on Vimeo.
A first implementation of the audio processing is complete. Currently, it uses the original DBAP algorithm with no convex hull, so sound sources located outside of the speaker field will not sound convincing.
April 2, 2024
GUI for DBAP complete from Trond Lossius on Vimeo.
Some finishing touches for now: Introducing a pop-up menu for choosing whether to edit position of sources (input channels), destinations (output channels) or none. I’m contemplating showing and hiding the two tables in the right column based on menu choice, and possibly make them inactive (uneditable) when editing mode is set to “none”.
But for now it is more interesting to move on to implement the DSP algorithm itself. Rather than implementing DBAP as first published by me, Pia and Theo in 2007, I contemplate testing out the improved algorithm proposed by Jacob Sundstrom in 2021.
March 31, 2024
DBAP GUI is almost complete from Trond Lossius on Vimeo.
The GUI for the DBAP plugin is almost complete. What remains to be done is to add a menu or button to choose whether to interact with and edit the positions of inputs or outputs. When that is done, it is time to implement the DSP process.
March 28, 2024
Juce – MVC with custom XY Pad component from Trond Lossius on Vimeo.
After two failed attempt, the third attempt succeeded.
This is a fairly simple plugin, and is mostly meant as a study (étude) into a specific programming problem when developing plugins in C++ with the Juce framework. The plugin controls gain and pan. ValueTreeState enables model-view-control separation, and as compared to an earlier study, it expands by implementing a custom component in the form of a two-dimensional control pad that controls gain as well as pan.
In figuring this out, I have drawn extensively on YouTube tutorials by Akash Murthy and Florian Mrugalla, and not least source code for the IEM ambisonic plugins. From the latter, I have in particular studied code for the SpherePanner component and the ProbeDecoder plugin.
This brings me one step further towards implementing DBAP as a VST plugin. That is itself a study towards porting Ambisonic Toolkit higher-order functionalities from SuperCollider to plugins. I hope to be able to embark on that journey later this year.
March 28, 2024
Close, but no cigar from Trond Lossius on Vimeo.
Back to the drawing room again…
For older blog posts, please refer to the monthly archives.
