Project 2 Sound Spatialization

For project 2 I wanted to take advantage of the Media Lab’s 8-channel sound system to create an immersive experience for a listener. Using the HOA Library, I generate lissajous patterns in sonic space as well as allow a user to control the exact placement of one of the three sounds.

In order to emphasize the movement of the sounds, I also have uplighting for the loudspeakers, where each sound corresponds to either red, green, or blue and the moving average amplitude of a signal coming out of a speaker dictates the color values for the lights.

The sounds that are played include sounds made from granular synthesis using parameters based on an accelerometer sent through a Raspberry Pi as well as other effects applied to audio files controlled by a Seaboard (done by Ramin Akhavijou and Rob Keller).

This Google Drive folder includes all of the Max Patches for our project.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WZH1nr-ARBmZOF9gPrks3_Oh1Q5mJTS8
The top-level patch that incorporates everything with a (somewhat organized) presentation view is main.maxpat. Most of my work (aside from putting together main.maxpat) is in ambisonics.maxpat, which in turn has several subpatches and sub-subpatches and so on.
ambisonics.maxpat is what receives sounds, sound position coordinates, and outputs data to speakers and lights. poly voicecontrol is where the positioning of an individual sound is handled. placement.maxpat calculates the position for a sound (using coord.maxpat) and spatialize.maxpat contains calls to the HOA Library to calculate the signals that should come out of each speaker channel. These are sent to poly light to calculate the light channel value and write it into the appropriate cell of a global matrix. The global matrix is accessed in ambisonics.maxpat to the lights.

 

Here’s a rough video of our project in action