Applied Ambisonics

That's the incredibly obscure title I put on my resume for the research I'm a part of this semester. While my employers may not know what that means, the breakdown is as follows:

Ambisonics: a way of encoding and decoding audio information using vector math. While the current system of "surround sound" uses simple pan pots to give the illusion of position inside a sound field, ambisonics makes use of the way sound waves interact (reflection, refraction, interference) within an acoustic space. As a result, Ambi-B formats need to be calibrated for each individual speaker setup. Calibration includes identifying where the speakers are placed in the room; their angle and distance from one another.

Applied: we created an interactive sound field where users, by turning their heads, could focus on different audio point sources in a virtual sound field. The input to our program is a magnetometer on top of the person's head that tracks which direction they're is facing. Stephen demonstrates:


Preparing for BOOM included a lot of long nights, one of which I'd like to share with you now:

8:30pm - I show up at the lab. Spencer is already working. Stephen shows up 15 minutes later.

9:23pm - Spencer shows us Unpimp ze Auto

9:31pm - Spencer shows us the robot chicken Gummi Bear. We are clearly getting a lot of work done

11:15pm - Graeme and Kat join us

12:08am - Graeme points out that he's been video taped while teaching CS211, and the video made it to the front page of cornell.edu . We laugh for 10 minutes about how functions return "birthday presents".

12:40am - Spencer finds a semi functional retro game device in the lab. We take 7 minutes from work to play the math game "less than or greater than". In the process, the old batteries leak out onto Spencer's hand causing a battery burn casualty.

2:30am - most of the team calls it quits for the night, except me and Spencer. We're convinced we can solve the problem before we go to bed

3:30am - we contemplate the idea of going to bed out loud.

7:00am -bed