Consultation des notices

When reproducing only the temporal and spectral characteristics of a sound source, but not its spatially varying radiation patterns, the perception of timbre at the listener’s position can be both inaccurate and unrealistic. This is especially true in reverberant environments such as concert halls. Preserving the radiation characteristics of a sound source has therefore become a challenging task in virtual audio environments. This article discusses technologies applied to a networked audio live concert in which the sound radiation characteristics of a solo instrument have been transmitted over the Internet in order to enhance the listening experience. The sound field was captured with a surrounding 64-channel spherical microphone array at the IEM in Graz, decomposed into spherical harmonics and streamed with lowest possible latency over the Internet to IRCAM in Paris. At IRCAM the solo instrument was reproduced with a linear 128-loudspeaker wave field synthesis (WFS) array. The mapping of radiation patterns encoded in spherical harmonic domain to circular harmonic domain is outlined with respect to WFS rendering.