Hello! I’ve spent the last week doing a refresh in SC. My Github repos told me the last time I used it was 2018 so it’s been a while.
I found this forum quite helpful for my Ambisonics project. My plan is to make a system of realtime hardware controllers to control transformation parameters for a (hopefully arbitrary) number of sound sources into Ambisonic soundfields.
I have a demo as of today! It assumes a bunch of hardware and a Linux host. Check the README for technical details. My hope is to have a general purpose system to “think of sound in 3D” compositionally with realtime controls. For example, my first big realization of what Ambisonics could do was when I moved a recorded voice’s soundfield behind me and it was effortless to focus on “the foreground” and “the background” at once. I though this was a good demonstration of the concept of binaural auditory displays.
Obviously musicians train to separate a complex sound into parts without the aid of technology, myself included but I think it’s quite cool how I can move any instrument around the space with Ambisonics and some physical controllers.
Before getting back into computer music (by way of SC) I spent this year working with generative AI sound applications. Specifically text-to-speech, speech-to-text and music generation. A big open ended question I have; is it interesting to work with generative AI for experimental music? I think it would be but the hardware setup I could come up with is quite a lot more than I expected. The text-to-speech synthesis and custom voice creation I’ve worked with is quite cool, as is the open source “musicgen” models from Facebook Research but I’m new to the field as of this year. It’s a lot to study at once.
I find it fascinating to combine Ambisonics for “place” and gen AI for “time” into a detailed model that gets pretty close to the way we perceive the external world. Full disclosure, I was working for a commercial company doing these things but I am no longer. I’m predominantly interested in making experimental art and music today. I’m curious what this community thinks about these subjects.