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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)
The first person to tie this to a worldwide conspiracy against OGG gets a pizza.
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?
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.
There is an exact distance required between each speaker, and also a lot of speakers involved as well. According to the article, we're talking 300 to 400 small speakers in a grid spread out over the space of the entire theater room.
Of course it's much easier to make a virtual point from which the sound is coming from when you have so many real points that the sound can start at to play with.
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
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
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.
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)
If you can place a sound anywhere in the theatre then I can imagine a bored sound tech having fun by making a fart sound come from a random audience member...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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)
Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.
Ah, but headphones can only easily position sound relative to your head's position and orientation -- whereas this room wafefront synthesis system positions sound relative to the *room*. A sound 50 feet behind the right wall will sound 50 feed behind the right wall to a listener no matter where they are sitting in the theater and no matter which way they're looking.
To emulate this with headphones, you'd need some sort of position/orientation tracking system on each pair of headphones. So now the question is, which is more complex: hundreds of fixed speakers playing phase-synchronized sounds in a coordinated fashion, or hundreds of individual headphone units with tracking devices each playing one version of the virtual "source" material customized for each listener?
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
Ah, but headphones can only easily position sound relative to your head's position and orientation -- whereas this room wafefront synthesis system positions sound relative to the *room*.
Is this really what someone watching a film wants? This technology might be cool for theme events etc but when you are in the cinema you are sitting in one position and not moving around. I myself as a film goer would prefer to know that wherever i sat in the auditorium i'd be getting the same experience as everyone else. And from a movie producers point of view id want everyone who saw my film to have an equal experience.
when you are watching something on a movie screen you want the audio relative to the movie ; what you are watching. Not to the room in which you are watching.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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...
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