AudioKit is a Swift-language audio synthesis, processing, and analysis platform for iOS, macOS (including Catalyst), and tvOS. Having had an eye on it for a long time, this morning I managed to get the AudioKit Cookbook for iOS and macOS demo app up and running and making sound.
I look forward to exploring it further.
Little by little, I am dipping my toes into SwiftUI programming to make apps that work across macOS, iPadOS, iOS, and tvOS. So far, I have mostly followed online tutorials and LinkedIn Learning courses, but today I made my first app from the ground up.
It is a simple remake of the Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. From a programming perspective, it is not too difficult, making it an appropriate initial task.
The source code is available on GitHub.
Traffic and construction in To Kwa Wan.
Copyright 2024 by 3D Hong Kong Topophonies.
Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
3D Hong Kong Topophonies is a research project that aims to capture and preserve the unique soundscapes of Hong Kong as intangible heritage using 3D sound recording and reproduction technologies. Their website offers an online archive for experiencing, reimagining and reinterpreting soundscapes of Hong Kong. The project is rooted in the fields of soundscape studies and acoustic ecology, as it contributes to raising awareness of our complex relationship with our environment and sense of place through sounds, as well as the value of sound preservation.
The archive encompasses five representative types of landscapes found in Hong Kong: new towns, old towns, villages, industrial areas, and nature. Through the online sound map, you can immerse yourself in these places through binaural audio recordings, and we aspire to foster interdisciplinary soundscape research and facilitate educational opportunities through this immersive online platform.
In this research project, an archive is not only about the preservation of documents from the past, but also a platform for generating new knowledge through various ways of making sense of it and for creating new forms of engagement to reinterpret its content. By offering recordings under the Creative Commons License, they encourage creative and interdisciplinary research, enabling users to experience and repurpose the content anytime and anywhere and anywhere, facilitating strong international dissemination of the research.
By preserving soundmarks, sounds of local cultural activities, natural and urban soundscapes, and potentially disappearing sounds, the project seeks to create an extensive intangible heritage archive for future generations. Their platform has potential for interdisciplinary exploration and artistic engagement, offering an aesthetic system for organising the archive and creating new opportunities for research and creative practice.
Cedric Maridet leads the research project at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. The recordings are made with ambisonic microphones from Sennheiser, Zylia, and spcmic. Binaural versions are available for download at the website. 1st- and 3rd-order ambisonic recordings are available upon request.
QLab 5.5 introduces Object Audio as a new tool for sound design. With this, you can describe the speaker layout used in live performance or a sound installation, and then design audio cues with trajectories that move the sound sources within the space. It seems to be nicely designed, possibly taking a few ideas from the paper on DBAP by me, Pia Baltazar and Theo de la Hogue.
The spatialisation technique resembles DBAP, but with further refinements that substantially improves behaviour in edge cases where classic DBAP struggles, using shadows and filters. The heat map, as well as the ability to use the technique to move and crossfade between several paralell audio FXs, were both suggested in our paper.
It is nice to see such a well-made and thorough implementation of these ideas.
I am remixing a previous work in order to spatialise in seventh rather than third order Ambisonic. For upcoming concerts. I have to be able to provide the resulting work in Ambisonic as well as Dolby Atmos theatrical format. Based on experience from our sessions at Lillehammer last winter, I will mix all scenes in seventh order Ambisonic. This can either be decoded directly, or I will use Blue Ripple to decode to a 64 channel dome, further mapped to 64 Dolby Atmos objects.
I now test out a rather complex system combining
Let’s see how and if this might work…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For older blog posts, please refer to the monthly archives.
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Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Norway License. |