"Spatial Sound - principles and practice"

It will be aimed at the electro-acoustic music composer and recordist and will focus on practical techniques and technologies. There will be no mathematics or deep theoretical content: the emphasis instead will be on providing principles and practice upon which students can build to develop their own systems and approaches that suit their personal musical and technical requirements and capabilities.

** Due to the nature of air travel it will be difficult to bring a great deal of equipment with me and as a result I intend to focus on the principles in the classes, and I will be giving students information to enable them to develop their own techniques using equipment and software they can experiment with themselves after the course.** We will however be able to do some practical work with the University's ST350 Soundfield Microphone.

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Spatial Sound - Principles & Practice

Course Outline
Day 1. From stereo to surround - from Blumlein to... Blumlein
Day 2. 5.1 and Beyond - the development of Surround Sound - problems and solutions - Introducing Ambisonics
Day 3. The story of Ambisonics - audio rendering - Ambisonic production, distribution and workflow - Ambisonic recording, mixing and release formats
Day 4. Practical Ambisonic production (Soundfield Mic recordings to G Format as DTS downloadable files and discs )

In more detail:

Day 1
The course will begin with the origins of stereo sound capture, recording and reproduction, with special focus on the inventions of Alan Dower Blumlein. (The same principles are used in the Soundfield Microphone, extended into three dimensions.) We will compare coincident mic techniques with spaced mic techniques and examine the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches - they will be useful in our understanding of surround sound recording.

Day 2
We will then look at the development of surround sound for movies and current techniques used for recording and replaying surround sound. We will discover that these approaches are not very effective, especially where a high degree of realism is required. We will compare traditional surround techniques against the Ambisonic surround system.

Day 3
The history and development of Ambisonics will be discussed, with particular focus on the Soundfield Microphone and on Ambisonic Mixing from multitrack. We will look at the tools that have been developed for Ambisonic surround-sound recording and production: initially pieces of analogue studio hardware and more recently plugins and other DAW software-based techniques. Students will be given sources and information to help them develop their own software-based mixing systems and techniques. We will download and experience some Ambisonic recordings.

Day 4
We will carry out some practical recording using the University's Soundfield Microphone and students will learn how to work with Ambisonic B-Format surround signals and convert them into a form suitable for listening on conventional home surround-sound systems (eg home cinema/DVD playback systems) with inexpensive software running on Windows computers.