Slashdot Mirror
3D Sound by Creator of MP3
im333mfg writes "News.com has an article detailing the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology's latest and greatest audio solution, Iosono, or as they're putting it 'true three dimensional audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small sweet spot, perhaps a few feet wide, while the Iosono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.'"
Will someone in the porn industry pick this up? I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
pimpmobiles. Imagine a car with hundreds of goldplated speakers everywhere..
I don't understand how these can exactly pinpoint sounds unless there is an exact distance required between each speaker. Of course, I didn't RTFA. (-1 Uninformed)
The first person to tie this to a worldwide conspiracy against OGG gets a pizza.
The implications of this technology for the porn industry alone are astounding!
This way to the egress...
just look around you. you can smell the fear?
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... use all of yOUR senses. see you there?
Supposedly, "ambisonic" sound is superior to traditional stereo/5.1/7.1 systems and has the added benefit of actually being used in some recordings, so is there any comparison between the two methods?
All I need is a Beowulf cluster of those and an obligatory popcorn stand.
What about farts? Will the theatre shake?
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400.
Not very surprising that 300 speakers will give you a better surround experience.
The article says "To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be...". This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using from some years to deliver true surround sound from a flat panel speaker.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Iosono in English
Byt the way, anyone knows how is it related to this: Single Speaker Unit Delivers Surround Sound?
No doubt they have taken patents out, despite audio holograms being described in a speech at Dennis Garbor's 1971 Nobel prize ceremony. Presumably there are papers out there dating from 1950 as well.
People have also been using computers to generate holograms for years, so the algorithms can hardly be new.
Wonder how long before someone hacks the output to include a buzzing mosquito... :-)
Also, presumably the underlying stuff was done years
ago at somewhere (say IRCAM in France)??
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle
Yes thats right 300-400 speakers, i must say this is downright impractical for all but the most crazed of audiophiles. Interesting and superior technology to whats out there, but sounds like this will go the way of the betamax
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
So do they hand you your headphones when you first enter the theatre (thus dooming you to a particular seat), or after you sit down?
Once again, we run into an amusing attempt to get around a fundamental limit in human perception... We have two ears, and our skin can detect (with almost no dicriminatory ability) strong low-frequency sound. Two channels plus the bass.
So why do research groups like Dolby and Fraunhofer keep coming out with new ideas like this "3d" sound? More channels (given an encoding that can make use of them) just adds degrees of freedom to where someone can sit (ie, expands the "sweet" spot) and get decent quality sound - At the expense of more, higher-quality speakers, various sound dampening and/or reflecting materials, architectural considerations, etc. Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.
you insensitive clod...
Wouldn't it be better if the main thing contained a link to the English part of the site rather than the German? http://www.iosono-sound.com/eng/index.html
This can already be done with headphones anyway, using cards like SB Live (I think) and Aureal Vortex cards. Not good for cinema though, but for computer audio, it would work fine.
The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here).
However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.
Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.
I think three microphones are enough to pinpoint a sound (as in triangulation). Four microphones should be enough to cover a square.
"I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action."
;-)
If YOU are right in the middle of the action, then it can possibly be convincing.
"This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited [1limited.com] have been using from some years"
Phased array speakers were introduced approx 30 years ago by Dahlquist.
This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using ...
Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way.
The key issue seems to be that as you progress from just a few point sources to hundreds, you're no longer just approximating a fully distributed source but you're actually starting to implement one physically. Once you accept that that's what you're doing, then you should stop thinking about "number of speakers" and focus on area coverage with flat panels.
Nobody is nuts enough to consider wiring up hundreds of speakers as a viable home market option, but replacing wallpaper with a few large robust decorative sound panels would easily be acceptable in many an ordinary home.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
While IRCAM says:
Huyghens' Principle
To illustrate Huyghens' principle, let us consider a simple example. A rock (or primary source) thrown in the middle of a pond generates a wave front that propagates along the surface. Huyghens' principle indicates that an identical wave front can be generated by simultaneously dropping an infinite number of rocks (secondary sources) along any position defined by the passage of the primary wave front. This synthesized wave front will be perfectly accurate outside of the zone delimited by the secondary source distribution. The secondary sources therefore act as a "relay", and can reproduce the original primary wave front in absence of a primary source!
Origins of Wave Field Synthesis
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is based on a series of simplifications of the previous principle. The first work to have been published on the subject dates back to 1988 and is attributed to Professor A.J. Berkhout of the acoustics and seismology team of the Technological University of Delft (T.U.D.) in Holland. This research was continued throughout the 90's by the T.U.D. as well as by the Research and Development department of France Telecom Lannion.
loc. cit.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Isn't this going to turn into a phasey mess? The beaming effects and reflections off walls from all those speakers is going to trash music.
Anyone knows if/how the surrond using typical 4/6 speaker sets could be done better using some of the advanced sound wave interference algorithms? Even in a small `fine spot'?
...OGG already supports... hey, wait a sec...
Oh God! OGG only supports 255 channels! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!! ARRRGGHHHH!!!!!
I justify the above comment based solely on the following points:
I just wanted to say it before someone else did ^_^
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
If YOU are right in the middle of the action, then it can possibly be convincing. ;-)
You mean convincing or convicting?
Eww, really?
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I believe the audiobook of Steven King's "The Mist" did this a number of years ago, in at least 1995 or earlier? All it required was one set of headphones and you could hear a fly buzzing around your ear or could practically see someone walk past you if you closed your eyes.
thehomeland(.org)
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft IIS has a history of defending their IP (MPEG 1 audio layer 3 e.g. MP3). As most /.-ers know, MP3 decoder licensing is free, but a "commercial" encoder will cost ya (licensing info). I wonder what the scam will be for losono.....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Ok, I get how the WFS works to generate wave fronts that look like they came from various points behind (or even in front of) the speaker array.
But according to this site:
" Virtual point sources situated in front of the loudspeaker array. An extension of the WFS principle allows the synthesis of sources within the listening area at positions where no physical sources are actually present. These "sound holograms" are created when a wave front created by the loudspeaker array converges onto a fixed position inside of the listening room. The wave front is then naturally re-emitted from the target position to the rest of the listening area. The sound field is therefore inaccurate between the loudspeaker array and the target position but perfectly valid beyond it."
So a sound "appearing" in the center isle will have to pass through both sides of the theater before being generated. How can this be done without, at best, having some sort of phasey distorted pre-echo before the main wave from the center source reaches your ears?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
There is a much cheaper way to do this.
.... Play ...
...
Simply purchase a polystyrene head (of the sort used for placing wigs and hairpeices)
Slice down the middle with a hot wire and hollow out the ear canals for two microphones and embed these in the head. Glue back together and jack the trailing leads from your head's "ears" into your favorite recording equipments. And
It works , its cheap and simple, and best of all no fraunhoffer licensing fee's
here are some examples (including mp3's) of the technique...
Binauraul Holophonic Sound
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
try and find a copy of cyborgasm
click here for amazon
with a good pair of headphones, it's a very surreal and believable 3-d audio experience..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A stereo system is a 1D system. You can, if you're lucky, decide at what point on the line between speaker 1 and 2 a sound is coming from.
Due to the way our brain is working, and simple physics, you can to some extent also emulate, or in some extreme cases even simulate a sound being slightly off (in a 2D sense) this line, using delays - using time as a "dimension".
Using a 4 channel system, where you are put in the center, you can extend this 1D "experience" into a 2D experience. Still, it's only 2D. You can tell if a sound is coming from the left or the right. To some extent also front/back. But, it's still only 2D + timing-dependent distance in the plane.
This makes sense, since we humans are really only hooked up to understand sound in a plane - the surface of the earth we walk. Had we been intended to understand 3D sound we'd have a third ear. Plain and simple.
We obviously can, like many other animals, turn our head around a bit to both get front/back information and up/down information from a sound. But this also displays how absurd a claim of 3D sound is: for it to be 3D sound it'd need sound emitters above + below us.
3D my ass. It's as much 3D as a CRT or LCD, even if driven by wildcat's or SGI's.
1. This is Fraunhofer we're talking about here, and they were quite aggressive in ridding the world of those damned pesky free MP3 encoders. This announcement may be news for nerds, but it ain't stuff that matters to the free & open-source community (technically speaking)..
n dex.html.
2. As another post points out, wave field synthesis is hardy a new thing. Marije Baalman demonstrated her recent work at the last Linux audio conference in April, you can check out her implementation of the system at http://gigant.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~baalman/program/i
Cool stuff...
oops, finger-check
;-)
was supposed to say,
If you (i.e. the downloader) are right in the middle of the action, then it CAN'T possibly be convincing.
So far, the only true sound reproduction without any purity problem that was ever created is monaural. It doesn't have phasing problems, it doesn't have listener's position problems, it doesn't have any problem whatsoever. We know the sound is coming from that column you see there and the sound is pristine, perfect quality.
... an experiment. If it works, it will become another IMAX/OMNIMAX where you need to go to science expos to see carefully selected footage that will give you the maximum sensations and show what it should be in movies.
...? When most theaters are not even THX approved and don't plan on be... and when most movies don't really use anything else than left-center-right ... What's the deal?
... and I will start to be interested to 500.
Since the 70's, stereophonic sound has made it big. We all know stereo sound is perfect to listen to music. And it truly is. You can immerse yourself in music, be with the musicians. We still have problems with phasing, with distortion, with creating a really good panoramic sound, with filling the room with music, with being able not to pinpoint where the speakers are... these are slowly resolved. We're getting there.
Then there's the 3-channel surround sound... 4-channel... 5-channel... 6-channel... 7-channel...
Heck, when I go see a recent movie, I hardly hear the 3rd channel being used. Sometimes with some SFX, sometimes with some bad quality wooshing effect. Some movies will be pointed to me as using that quality I am looking for. What are they? 5 movies over the whole lot?
Take the latest James Bond. You sometimes hear ambience on the back speakers... ooh big deal.
And don't speak me about the "walking stick" the ".1" channel is. If the quality was there, we would have 5 real channels of pure full-frequency range sound, including low frequencies.
So for me, this experiment is precisely that
And what about the quality of these speakers? I mean, I can barely buy two good speakers at $1000. What about 200? What about all the problems of movie production, sound reproduction, positionning, quality, sound check,
Would a movie producer be really interested in making a scene where you hear two actors arriving from the aisles, where you hear them perfectly but don't see them on screen because it would all screw up our small minds, seeing them in front but hearing them to our side? Meh, not so sure!
Anyways, let's just finish this by saying : Ok, 500 speakers if you want... but start by give me the same quality and use that quality in 5 channels
Mike
Just about anybody who wants to watch more than twenty movies, with the theaters' inflated prices of popcorn and child care (if the parents believe the kids too young for PG-13 or R), should be able to afford at least a cheap DLP projector.
One should mention, there already is one cinema using this technology!
This one is located in Ilmenau, a small german university city, also home town of the mentioned Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (lead by mp3 inventor Brandenburg).
They show one trailer which has 'real' iosono sound (that means, object orientated and rendered live for the showroom, rather than mixed down on five channels and spacially blurred by the crap speaker placement in a common cinema).
The films itself are currently shown in a compatible 5.1 mode, which places virtual speakers in a distance larger than the room dimensions, which creates a bigger sweet spot than currently possible.
And another nice detail: As far as i know, there already are people using this technology - in a real life environment! So watch out - this stuff is coming.
--
[adv] check the t-shirts at http://www.ilmenau-textil.de/
Uhm, didn't Aureal figure this out back when they were selling their Vortex sound cards that featured A3D?
Even if this produces three dimensional sound, I doubt it would remedy the lack of depth in today's pop music.
All stem from the fact that it needs headphones to work. A big one is that if you turn your head, the image of the sound turns with it, and that sounds wrong. You don't realise it, but you do move your head a little to help with audio cues. You also move it more drasticly for other reasons. Your brain expects that the sonic image it's being presented will change in certian ways when this happens, but with a binaural recording (since it's strapped to your head) it doesn't.
Another problem is simply the inconvienece of needing to use headphones. It is desireable to not have something strapped on your head to listen to music often. Can you imagine the problems with trying to provide headphones to every theatre patron, and making sure they weren't stolen/destroyed in the process. Never mind the discomfort for those of us with glasses.
Also there is just a problem with bass. For various reasons, bass just doesn't sound as full when played through headphones. I have a pair of high quality Sennheiser headphones connected toa custom headphone amp and they have resolution and detail far beyond my speakers. However, despite all that, the bass is just more datifying out of the speakers, though technically the headphones produce lower frequencies.
Binaural recordings and HRTF technologies are cool and all, but they are not a replacement for a good surround setup at this point.
Couldn't this give the sonic experience of a much quieter club for those who want it, by building a sweet spot that was the floor only, and yet filled that floor completely, while creating an intense non-mono ride?
Looks good for your age..
You can play binaural recordings back on speakers properly if you process the sound with a crosstalk cancellation algorithm (because some sound from the left speaker goes into your right ear and vice versa). You even only need two speakers (after all you have two ears).d ownload .html
Demo sound files of one method can be found here:
http://www.isvr.soton.ac.uk/FDAG/vap/html/
Make sure to read the Readme for speaker arrangement or it won't work.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Dummy heads used for recording have no pinnea (parts of the ears outside the body) so they can be more generic. It turns out that the specific shape of the ear lobes is important, and variations between people make the use of one person's ear shape for recording not work as well when played back for some other people. That's why it's best to get the microphones that you can stick in your own ears. The imaging will be much better, and you'll even find you'll be able to hear a much better near-far and up/down distinction than if you had used a recording head.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Why don't we all just skip this speaker crap, and spend some time in the real world listening to things approach us. Going to the bus depo to enjoy the aural experience is a lot cheaper then setting up to hear it on TV.
-REM I wish I had friends
Echo OFF
crap!
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
I think, parent gets NO pizza!
We are picking more than just two signals with our hears, so a headset is not exactly the same as real 3D sound. Even with one hear you can hear
where the sound is coming from, you have a small information on direction.
So you would need a complete helmet around your
head with micro ( nano ? ) speakers all around.
Also it's interesting to look at the compression
of this sound, as close speakers should have similar channels, most of the signals could be stored by storing the error produced by a mere
interpolation.
Seems to me that the best and cheapest
home-theater one could have is a spheric fish tank
over the head... sound coming from every where, and image drawn on your eyes with a laser beam...
Voila, no better immersion.
Although this might be a problem for eating pop-corns.
Check out http://www.embracingsound.com/, far more practical for home use. :)
(And yes, I've actually been to an Embracingsound demo, and IT IS far better than a 5.1 system. Even when A/B switching between them.)
Pet peeve: This isn't 3D, and no other sound device or technology which has been marketed as "3D" is. If you put a speaker on the ceiling, you might get something approaching 3D, but a bunch of speakers at the same ground level are 2D (a plane), simple stereo is 1D (a line) and mono is 0D (a dot).
I think this would be a nice thing in 3D-movies.This would also remove the problem of irritation by 3D-sound
Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
Death to the Americans in Iraq and the Zionists in Palestine!
Tahya al-Intifada!