Ambisynth

Figure 1: Sound Sphere in the Center for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey. The person is shown standing in the intended orientation, facing the front of the sphere. Introduction I recently needed some audio content that I could quickly render for playback in the sound sphere shewn in Figure 1. There are a reasonable amount of free ambisonic recordings available online, e.g. Angelo Farina Youtube So I spent some time putting together tools to render ambisonics in the sphere, and here I wanted to share what I learned in case anybody else at CVSSP wants to try this out in the future. Speaker Arrangement The sphere has 24 speakers (plus a subwoofer which I will henceforth ignore), which at the time of writing are arranged as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3. Figure 2: Speaker layout. The center of the diagram represents the top of the sphere. The top of the diagram represents the front of the sphere. Th...

A taxonomy of audio augmented reality with examples. Introduction With the new year, I am working on a new project involving audio augmented reality (AAR). I started doing a literature review on the topic, and it turns out that I'm not even sure what the term "audio augmented reality" means. So I started grouping the projects I have seen, and I have identified at least 5 distinct situations that have been or could be, in my estimation, called AAR. These are as follows (with examples): Enchanting silent physical objects with digital sound Enchanted textiles Enchanted paper / books / maps Enchanted footballs / sports equipment Overlay of extra audio information onto the real world sat nav self-guided in-ear museum tours Digital sound-objects placed in real 3d space Sound attached to virtual objects in AR Games Geolocated narrative Geolocated music playlists ...

Introduction Anyone within earshot knows, and is already sick of the fact, that I have been obsessed with knitting and crochet for the past few months. I bought a knitting machine and have been knitting everything from scarves to topological manifolds to non-euclidian surfaces. I've been looking at knit art-installations, Daina Taimina, amigurumi, the hyperbolic crochet coral reef project, and yarn bombing. I convinced myself that knit fabric cannot exist in any dimension other than 3 and that knit fabric, despite the etymology, is topologically not a knot. I re-read Alan-Turing's seminal paper on the Entscheidungsproblem to try to determine if knitting is Turing-complete (I'm still not sure). And I have been trying to design an anti-knitting machine that can annihilate with a knitting machine. Figure 1: Some random things I knit (including a Klein bottle on the right). Conductive Yarn And then I discovered conductive yarn, and it blew my mind. Conductive yarn is mos...