Listening to 3D sounds with directional headphones

'I love teknology' Adamski said at the end of the 1980's. 

Or maybe it was his MC?


I cannot answer this question. And it's not the point of this post. 

This is the point of this post: I _also_ love technology, though you might notice I spell it slightly differently, and I have a preference for the audio-related variety.

Look at these words.

3D audio.

Sounds cool right? It is! Everyday, those of us with two working ears use our sound localisation skills to navigate our way around this planet, exploit the cocktail party effect to pinpoint preferred sound sources and enjoy surround sound audio to enhance the movie-watching experience. That's 3D audio.

Headphones immediately remove all that enjoyment and reduce the listeners' experience to a simple stereo affair, with no relationship to the outside world; no more than you would expect, of course!

Here at the MachineMen labs, we began to re-explore (after taking an initial look some years ago) Ambisonics - simply put, a technology which offers 3D recording, improved spacialisation when played through speakers (compared to basic quadraphonic and other surround sound formats) and appears to be endlessly future-compatible! Now this last one is good, I know it.

Soundfield microphones are used to capture the spaces on to (simply put) many mono audio tracks. These tracks are then passed through some clever maths to translate to your preferred listening format; mono, stereo, quadraphonic, 5.1, 7.1... and binaural. Binaural is my favourite - it outputs the audio in a form which, when playing back on headphones, puts your ears in same position as the microphone.

Here at the MachineMen labs we imagined what it might be like to bring together head-tracking information and this incredible 3D sound technology. To be able to explore a 3D recording by just turning your head, was the vision. In the last few days I have achieved full 360 degree rotational-tracking in all 3 axis using a GyrOSC on the iPhone (to send compass data for Yaw), and a Wiimote's MotionPlus for Pitch and Roll.

Please excuse the packing tape:

This rotation data is sent over OSC (bluetooth and wireless), managed by Osculator, and sent to Plogue Bodule hosting a small selection of TOA plugins. After calibrating the 'front' of the signal, movements of the head are translated into rotation values and attached to the relevant rotation parameters of the plugin. 

When listening to material which was recorded on a Soundfield microphone (for example, an orchestra, where the microphone is placed in the centre seat in the front row), turning around 180 degrees reveals the reflections off the back wall, turning slightly to the right centres the mid/lower string section, and bending down to pull up my socks sounds like the orchestra are actually.. over there, in front of me.

Field recordings of street musicians can be explored by simply looking around, elements you might not normally hear can become your focus; feet tapping just behind, a plane soaring far above, the inane conversation to your right.

There are many Ambisonic recordings and productions available on Ambisonia, and here at the MachineMen labs we have plans to record and produce our own, and more importantly, develop the head-tracking technology into something more wearable and a lot lighter! We are also working on an experience fusing together 3D sound and vision, the likes of which have not been seen before, as part of our Oculus Rift line. Now that's going to be exciting.

Hope you are excited as we are about the future of 3D audio and it's integration in to the virtual world!

Thanks for reading.

More updates soon!

Matthew

Oculus and Plugins

Welcome back commited followers,

Long time, no write - we've been busy in the labs developing, playing, listening, looking, learning.. 

We have, in our hot little hands, an Oculus Rift. Wow, it really is something else. I remember playing on a similar-but-ancient-in-technical-degrees device (Virtuality) on the fifth floor, I believe, of the Trocadero in Central London in the mid-80's. Blocky, really laggy, heavy and cumbersome to use, but you could see the potential. 

The early developer model we have access to is still relatively lo-quality compared to the official planned product, but it is still a mind-opening (and slightly bending) experience! The ease of development in the Unity game development environment invites the possibility that inexperienced coders can really take them to places they only imagined!

Here is little demo of the madness:

As an aural aside, I've been tweaking with the 'waveset' audio technique, and came up with a plugin idea which can be used in a live situation as a brutal sonic destroyer or strange delay/looping effect, depending on the setting.

Mangles to-all-hell just about everything:



Having said that, this is one of our audio specialists, Tom Barton, playing guitar through it while I tweak and fiddle convincingly.

I have had a few "I believe this is an original thought" moments recently, mostly in the audio manipulation zone, which I'll be talking about here, once I've worked out if I need to protect them or not.

If you are a Plogue user and enjoyed the destruction of the plugin, please don't hesitate to ask for a copy of this primitive patch.

Until next time.

Matthew

Spectral Side Somethings

Greetings MachineMen Blog Readers!

We here at MachineMen Towers hope your New Year is moving forward gracefully, and plans are afoot for fun!

The kinds of fun we have here are exploring the difficult world of FFT. We have numerous machines both soft and hard which mangle the sound by breaking it down into thousands of sine waves, then doing strange looking maths on it (though this usefully obscured by clever looking technology) and putting it in your ears.

One of the most destructive, or beautiful depending on your perspective, audio plugins available is SpectrumWorx - the tagline is 'the ultimate sound mangler', and I'd say it's fairly high up there with the best of them. SpectrumWorx version 1 was originally released in the early 2000's, and a completely platonic relationship developed with the.. developer. It soon became my secret sonic weapon. Development slowed and the old owner sold the technology to those excellent chaps at Little Endian. I bludgeoned my way through to the beta team from where I have, in my unending belief, added great value to the product!

Some time last year they invited me to submit some presets for the latest release, which I was delighted to work on, and am now very pleased to have these 'sounds' included in the official product.

I say 'sounds'.. in fact it's more like a set of rules to help determine what might sound good through the plugin itself.

And here is what some of those rules sound like:

We hope you enjoyed this short foray into the sound of the future. Come back soon for more mind-bending concepts!
Phonically yours, Matthew

Welcome to the MachineMen Blog

Welcome to the MachineMen Blog.

As the company grows and develops we will post nuggets of information about the projects and people we are involved with.

We are looking forward to bringing you the first of many real-world and virtual examples of our unique products during development, including web and mobile apps, games for all platforms and audio tools.

To keep you curious, here is short video experiment using the GEM visual library extension for Pure Data, and my head.

See you in the New Year