0. ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen a considerable revival of interest in the possibilities afforded by surround sound. Since the days of quad, many different systems have been proposed and developed for widely varying applications, resulting in mutual incompatibilities and an absence of standards.

Over 1992-93 a thorough study of the literature was undertaken in order to settle on an economical and high-performance choice for projecting three dimensional sound in a geodesic dome, as well as more conventional venues. Apart from a considerable theoretical elegance and integrity, the Ambisonics approach was found to have many advantages in our application.

In 1993 a system was put together as an evaluation prototype on a shoestring budget. The implementation had both software and hardware components and it is the purpose of this paper to focus on the latter. It should be noted that we have now moved on to a much improved incarnation of the described system. However, the following material might be useful for those wanting to put together a working system using easily available components. The paper was written in June 1994 for the Synaesthetica '94 conference at ACAT and revised December 1995.

This research was carried out in partial fullfilment of the requirements for a Graduate Diploma at the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology (ACAT) under the supervision of David Worrall.

INDEX

1. Introduction
2. Previous Systems
3. Ambisonics
4. Implementation
5. Compositional Application
6. Critical Evaluation
7. Summary
8. References

This paper is copyright Kimmo Vennonen, 1995.