Virtual Acoustics, Impulse Response, Ambisonic, Binaural, Video Installation, CCRMA WAVE, CCRMA, Stanford University
An improvisation on materials consisting of reverberated found sounds is performed and mixed in real time. The reverberations are created by impulse response measurements taken from the sounds of sea waves crashing against the shoreline rocks beside Hook Head Lighthouse in Co. Wexford, Ireland. These reverberations create a kind of water-based virtual acoustic soundscape. The video for the work is created from an analogous multistage filtering process.
Some other technical notes:
On occasion, the reverberations are allowed to go into feedback. The feedback frequencies produced are a product of how the inputs from the improvisation are articulated/filtered by the acoustic properties of the various wave crashes. Several copies of this improvisation are then placed at various points in a third-order Ambisonics space. The phases of the outputs from each of these Ambisonics points—the 16 outputs of each channel—are randomly inverted back and forth creating spatial distortions. This is then rendered into binaural sound.