Dance Music goes 3D

The University of York is hosting a dance event featuring full surround sound, using the Ambisonics system developed by the Music Technology Group. It will be the first time that the technology has been used for an event of this sort - 3D sound has never before been used in a club outside London.

The system encodes spatial information as four channels of audio, and uses a custom-built decoder and sixteen independent speaker sends in order to simulate a 3D soundfield. Speakers will be arranged in two huge arrays, one placing speakers at the corners of a giant cube, and the other forming a massive 8-speaker circle around the dance space. New additions have allowed live sound sources to be mixed in and independently 'moved' in 3D using hardware devices. The entire soundfield can then be rotated in any direction using newly developed software running on a Silicon Graphics Indy. In addition, the system will ‘'recreate' natural acoustics captured using Soundfield^TM technology played back either via ADATs or as 4-channel soundfiles on another Silicon Graphics machine. Spatialisation will also be encoded in software and triggered as audio samples via MIDI. (For more information, click here.)

Performers have been drawn from staff and students at the University, and include ex-professional and semi-professional club performers. The event will feature an experimental '‘chill-out' room where perceptive effects of 3D sound can be experienced in a controlled environment. This is the subject of a research project at the University, and will use 12 channels of encoded audio decoded and mixed down into 8 speaker sends in a cubic array.

The event is scheduled for Saturday 2 March in Vanbrugh College of the University. Cost will be £2.50, and tickets are obtainable in advance from the Vanbrugh Junior Common Room Committee.

Last updated; 21st. March 1996 by Dave Malham.
If you have any suggestions, comments or requests you can reach me at dgm2@unix.york.ac.uk