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ATK-SC3 goes NFC-HOA — Hurray!
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Out Now!!!

ATK Central is pleased to announce the long anticipated arrival of the v.5.0.2 release of the Ambisonic Toolkit for SuperCollider.

Some notable features of the this release include:

  • Integrated support for classic First Order Ambisonics (FOA) and modern Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA).
  • Implements the Near-Field Controlled, aka Near-Field Compensated, form of higher order Ambisonics (NFC-HOA).
  • Ambisonic order is merely limited by system speed, channel capacity and numerical precision rather than by design.
  • Control and synthesis of the Near-Field Effect (NFE) of finite distance sources in both FOA and HOA, including radial beamforming.
  • Soundfield feature sensing & analysis in instantaneous and time averaged forms.
  • Ambisonic coefficients and matrices are available for inspection and manipulation in the interperter.
  • Angular domain soundfield decomposition and recomposition.
  • Analysis of transformer and decoder matrices.

As always, A Very Big Thanks to the SuperCollider Development Team for all the dedication and hard work!

In particular, the inclusion of access to the Boost library as part of SuperCollider 3.10.0 has meant we’re able to make the underlying numerics of NFC-HOA available in sclang.

A Game Changer?

Yeah!

NFC-HOA Numerics

Given access to NFC-HOA numerics, ATK-SC3 is now a research grade library. For instance, the behind the scenes design tasks we do here at ATK Central in other scientific computing frameworks (we use SciPy), can now be done in sclang.

Wow!

We’ve grouped these numerics, into several categories:

Huh?

Ok, we see we’ve lost you here…. as a research grade library we’re now able to address tasks like:

  • Designing personal binaural decoders within sclang
  • Designing microphone correction filters within sclang
  • Upsampling & correcting FOA RIRs to HOA within sclang

So, yeah, we think this is way cool!

(Future releases will include tutorials on these topics.)

Soundfield decomposition and recomposition

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With v.5.0.2 the ATK for SuperCollider offers radial soundfield decomposition and recomposition for NFC-HOA. Know any other toolkit for artists offering this? (We don’t either.)

Here are some things we can do with this feature:

  • Specify the radius at which a DAFX operates
  • Synthesize a complex HOA soundfield from an FOA soundfield
  • Extract, process and re-inject sources found at a given radius

Combine all this with soundfield feature sensing & analysis, the fun never ends!

How to upgrade?

Follow the installation instructions for ATK for SuperCollider.