3-Day IEM Ambisonics Workshop, Spring 2017

From Wed 26th to Fri 28th of April 2017, IEM successfully held its first 3-Day Ambisonics Workshop. It was the first workshop of this kind at IEM (a preceeding one was given at the International Film Music Festival in Krakow, 2016). The second one will be held Sep 11th to 13th after the International Conference on Spatial Audio, at IEM in Graz (see icsa2017.iem.at).

In the workshop on 26th to 28th of April 2017, the general lectures and the final presentations of the workshop (Wednesday and Friday) were visited by 40 people. In between those lectures, there were three hands-on workshops held in parallel:

1) Matthias Frank gave a hands-on workshop on Ambisonic recording and production where audiovisual panoramic recordings of a newly composed band were made and mixed at the IEM CUBE and IEM Production Studio. Recordings were made with the Eigenmike, Soundfield microphone, Oktava Ambient 4-D, spot microphones, etc. by 9 participants.

2) Markus Zaunschirm and Daniel Rudrich gave a hands-on workshop on the DIY Head Tracker for binaural Ambisonics, where 13 participants soldered their own take-away low-cost head tracker. The device outputs rotations in Tait-Bryan angles or quaternions and can be used for head-tracking (inverse rotation) or as pointer for real-time spatialization of sound sources.
Plans and codes are available in the repository (please register)
git.iem.at/DIY/MrHeadTracker
and described in the AES paper
www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm

3) Winfried Ritsch and Franz Zotter gave a hands-on workshop on Ambisonic microphones for field recording, thei encoding, level equalization, and showed hadware elements and theory that are available to build DIY higher-order Ambisonic microphones. There were 6 workshop participants. Winfried Ritsch documented preparations to an affordable Ambisonic DIY microphone iaem.at/kurse/projekte/am and git.iem.at/cm/AAMA, and showed how to embed work in the Algorithmic Composition Realtime Environment (ACRE) git.iem.at/pd/acre for artistic productions.

We could also test the IEM CUBELET loudspeaker that, in the meantime. The students also exhibited it at their journey to the AES COnvention in Berlin.

I thank all the participants and hands-on workshop lecturers (Markus, Daniel, Matthias, Winfried) for their commitment. We are looking forward to seeing you at future Ambisonic workshops at IEM!