a 16-channel Ambisonics piece
(Duration: 4’45’’)
Description and Contribution:
My project “Endless Roses in the Desert” is intended to be a 3rd order Ambisonics
– 16 channel – composition. By depicting a scene located in the desert, with different
sound elements surrounding the audience and coming from different directions, I intend
to create a spatialized piece and a virtual sound environment as if the audience are
under the dome of constellations.
At the beginning of the ideation, I tried to bring lively object – like Corsac foxes
– at the ground level. However, regarding to the fact that we don't have subwoofers
on the ground in the Experimental Theater, I turned the focus delicate designs onto
the overhead area, which is floating in the air. Thus, I plan to start off from a
flute melody and spatialize it to far left front, in order to attract the attention
of the audience to create a spacy and distant feeling, in comparison to the close and
strong sandstorm that people are surrounded by at the moment. All of the instrumental
elements are supposed to be soothing and relieving, even if the audience can consciously
notice that they're in the scene filled with strong sandstorms and uncertainties. Based
off this ideation, I kept the flute and piano stationary at the audience’s back, while
moving a lot of string instruments and different sound elements, because I want to create
a contrast in between lively objects and ancient cities in front of and behind them.
My project is an individual project. I finished a composition, production and specialization
on my own. Besides the sandstorm sounds and about 10 seconds of the flute samples from the royalty
free resources, the other elements were made by me, including the wavetables and sound design of
the instruments. Although I finish the project completely on my own, because I spend the range of
4 to 5 weeks on finishing the project, I did have different ideas regarding to my composition during
the processes. So, I made some changes in both composition and production during Week 9 and I redid
the specialization for the latest version.
Technical information:
I used Ableton Live, Reaper, and Audacity as the DAWs throughout the process
and used the plug-ins from E4L and IEM.
For the Spatialization, I did multiple attempts. Originally, the production started in Ableton Live and
I wanted my project to be integrated. With some self-learning on the Internet, I found E4L is available
in Ableton Live. E4L provided me with a user-friendly playground for me to explore different possibilities
in Ambisonics, up to 3rd order. Through multiple days of fine-tuning and different test runs, although
live performance sounds well, I had trouble exporting the 16-channel file from Ableton Live with the
spatialized piece. The integrated export of the E4L library cannot export 16-channel encoded Ambisonics file.
All exports are limited to stereo. I tried to use both of its Export Utility as well as exporting dummy channels
from the E4L plug-in and later recombine and remap different channels in Audacity. Unfortunately, both methodologies
didn’t work for me, so I had to do it again.
I decided to move to explore Reaper. Reaper and IEM plug-ins are able to realize the spatialization of my composition.
Since I started over in Reaper, with all my individual tracks from Ableton Live, I decided to work on 7th order Ambisonics
first for my ISAC 2024 competition at the same time, to challenge myself. Besides the ambient field recording of sand and
wind serves as a general background ambiance, which I made move in Brownian motions, all other sounds follow different patterns.
In my sound and space design, I use different sound components as rhetorical devices in metaphorically painting my world.
I planned different orbits to automate their “Azimuth” and “Elevation” for all of them and automate “Width” and “Rolls” for
some of them in a smaller range. I monitored through a 7-1 system in CPMC 268 and my closed-back monitor headphones as well as
IEM’s energy spectrum to make sure they follow my design. In addition to that, during my multiple attempts, I slower the
movements down as well, based on the feedbacks I got from our trial runs in both Experimental Theatre and Spat lab. After
submitting the competition, I had more control over Reaper and I finished the 3rd Ambisonics with 16 channels for my final
project (twice, because I changed my composition).