As you might know, my main colleague and research collaborator who works with me in the design of 3D musical interfaces is Zack Settel. In summer of 2008, he produced Blairatta Policeme, a volumetric concert piece for jazz trio, mobile chamner quartet, and audio-enhanced performance space. See his documentation for more about what this means. On that site, you’ll find a live recording by the CBC, as well as an excellent video that explains the main concepts.

Also most recently, Zack appears in a video interview (seulement en français) on the on the Télé-Québec site. In fact, you can also see me in some of the shots, apparently doing “research”.

I went to a meeting on Friday to discuss the development of a standard for describing spatial audio, called SpatDIF. There is now an official website and mailing list, so go check it out at www.spatdif.org.

The idea is quite nice, because it allows one to separate the contents of the 3D scene from the audio renderer. All that is required is to format messages for sound source positions and directivity in this OSC-style format:

/spatdif/source/1/position 1.23 7.98 5.4
/spatdif/source/*/directivity 1 0.7 0 0.7

Then, any SpatDIF-compatible renderer will be able to spatialize the sounds on the particular audio display that it is written for (eg, binaural, 5.1 surround, VBAP, Ambisonics, etc).