PDCON:Workshops/AUDIENCE

Instructor: Regis Faria

Keywords: spatial audio, sound scene production, auralization, sound immersion, spatial audio processing

AUDIENCE for Pd is a library for spatial audio with which users can build 2D/3D sound scenes, assign their sounds to objects within the scene and play it through several surround modes. The applicative can be used to build auralization patches and to provide audio immersion to other applications. Its operation is sound-scene oriented, enabling to work independently the sound scene composition, its acoustic rendering, its encoding in a suitable multichannel format, and finally its auralization, using 2D or 3D sound fields. A major feature of it is the sound scene conception independence from the listening mode, as the user can work out a desired sound scene spatial experience regardless of the loudspeaker configuration used to listen. The system is comprised of a collection of patches and externals compiled to OSX, Win32 and Linux. A typical project flow involves creating a sound scene (layer 1 object), configuring an acoustic rendering scheme (layer 2 object), encoding the spatial sound of the rendered scene (layer L3 object) and then decoding and playing the sound scene through a loudspeaker rig (layer 4 object). Auxiliary functions, such as transport, mixing and volume controls are available from objects in an auxiliary layer. AUDIENCE is presently employed as auralization engine in a CAVE system at the University of São Paulo, and has been further used as reference audio engine for reconfigurable digital music applications, soundscape design applications and scene-oriented mixing. The system is going to its 3rd. generation, with planned improvements in the usability and sound fidelity, expanding the number of spatial processing functions, and looking forward to enlarging its platform availability to prospecting new applications and user groups.

The workshop will introduce the system, show how to install and to work with it.