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Sound spatialisation

February 11, 2005

The last few days have seen a very interesting thread on the MaxMSP list concerning how to deal with multi-speaker setups for installations. A few days ago I posted the distance-based amplitude panning approach I used for the Living room project in Trondheim in 2003.

Michael Zbyszynski has emphasized the importance of using delays as time cues separated by Greater than more than about 10 ms tend to override the amplitude cues (the precedence effect). Today he posted an example patch illustrating how he did this for one of his installations.

I’ve always thought that delays would be very sensitive to the position of the audience and hence not work well in a situation where the notion of a sweet spot do not adhere. His mail yesterday made me think once more about it and realize that he’s right. He’s also pointed me towards a book that looks very interesting: Spatial Hearing: Psychophysics of human Sound Localization by Jens Blauert.