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Speaker array in a line, no sweetspot

Spat
#1

Hi,
For a big audio-visual installation in Copenhagen, I have planned to use spat to create the sound distribution. However, my setup is rather unconventional for multichannel setups, so I’d like to hear if someone has an idea how to solve my problem.

Te setup consists of 40 “gates” each equipped with 1 channel audio. The gates are set up in a long row with 2m spacing, resulting in an 80m speaker line array. I’d like to create moving sound sources along this line, where the sources are changing regarding their distance to the single speaker, but not to a sweet spot. The listeners are moving through the installation.

Does anyone have a suggestion how to set it up using spat.
Kind regards
Jonas

speakerPos.csv (402 Bytes)

#2

Hi Jonas,

I actually did that kind of thing and if you don’t need any special processing (like reverb or smth), you don’t need the perceptual processing by SPAT. I’m sure you can do it with SPAT somehow, but I guess it would be easier to use MAX directly without SPAT.

If you are from ObscuraDigital (if your alias means that), I would use TouchDesigner for this directly. It’s straight-forward enough programming. Anyway, that’s what I did for that kind of thing when I don’t have perceptual processing of any kind, which is the point of SPAT.

I guess you can combine Max and Touch via OSC and use spat/max speaker distribution capabilities, but I would guess it would be more efficient in just 1 piece of software.

Hope it helps,

Best
Shandor

#3

Hi Shandor,
Thanks for the fast reply. Almost, I am from a company Obscura ApS from Denmark. We do almost the same thing as ObscuraDigital and have ben running since almost the same time. However, the software I am about to create will be integrated within different software parts written in C++ created for this installation. I choose Spat as it provides a variety of different planning algorithms, I could easily switch, in order to find the one best working with the installation.
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to make the sound distribution just using spat.pan~, what works fine as long as I use the angular panning algorithm. At least the different versions of vbap aren’t working.
Kind regards
Jonas

spatPan_test.maxpat (10.6 KB)

#4

Ive done lots of things like this. You just need any DBAP like software - you draw a map of the speakers, set directivity - then you can automate soundsources around the speaker array. I would recomend Jamona in max msp though I am sure you could do it in spat - ive used various packages in max msp for this.