Immersive audio at the Royal Danish Academy of Music calls on an Ambisonics installation that comprises 48 channels – 44 loudspeakers and four subwoofers –arranged to form as accurate a hemisphere as possible.
‘Ideally, the speakers should form a hemisphere and ideally place the listener right in the middle,’ explains Jesper Andersen, Associate Professor and Head of Tonmeister Studies at the Academy. ‘We used a measurement microphone and determined the distance to the speaker that was the farthest away, and then we added delay to the rest in order to emulate a perfect circle in each speaker plane.
‘Using DAD AX32 [audio router and ADDA converter] with the SPQ speaker processor card brought us so much closer to the perfect hemisphere, as we measured and compensated each channel to deliver within a 1ms margin. The AX32/SPQ combo was an absolute genius solution to this problem.’
The idea of delivering sound from more than a single point, or at least one ‘side’, which is typically the front, is far from new… ‘In contemporary classical music that often includes one or more electronic elements, composers have experimented with placing speakers behind the audience or on the sides as far back as the 50s, 60s and 70s,’ Andersen elaborates. ‘In fact, there are examples in music history, dating back as far as the 17 century, about notes in the sheets that for example would place a musician behind the audience.’
More: www.digitalaudio.dk
