Headtracking for Binaural Ambisonic Playback

Fri, 02 May 2014 07:04:17 +0200

Here is a short tutorial about an inexpensive headtracking solution which you can use to improve the binaural listening experience with the ambix Ambisonic tools. The calibration software is currently Windows only, but the Pd patch is naturally cross-platform.

It uses the headtracker described here by Dennis Frie: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1677559
Parts: arduino nano, GY-85 sensor board.

A Pure Data patch provided by me receives the serial data from the Arduino based headtracker and sends OSC messages to the host of your choice. In this case I will describe the use within the digital audio workstation Reaper.

ambiX – Ambisonic plug-in suite

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 18:44:35 +0100

ambiX is a suite of free, cross-platform Ambisonic plug-ins for producing and post-producing 3D audio – encoding, rotating, warping, widening, decoding to loudspeakers or to headphones. They work in any multichannel host such as REAPER, Ardour or Max, and as standalone applications.

I first released them in January 2014, developed during my master thesis at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz. Together with mcfx they won the gold award at the AES Student Design Competition 2014, were promoted by Google for YouTube Ambisonics productions, and are still in wide use. The plug-ins follow the ambiX convention: full 3D, ACN channel order, SN3D normalization.

Download: github.com/kronihias/ambix/releases – installers for macOS and Windows; on Linux they can be built from source. Source code: github.com/kronihias/ambix (GPL).

Binaural on Matthias Kronlachner

Headtracking for Binaural Ambisonic Playback

ambiX – Ambisonic plug-in suite