Quick links:
CDP
Multi-Channel Toolkit
Soundcard Attrition Page
Microsoft multi-channel file format : Final Specification
WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE Examples!
PVOC-EX: New
WAVE_EX file format for the phase vocoder
Surround, Ambisonic and
multi-channel links
Downloads
About me:
I am sort of
English, an Aquarian, and old enough to remember the first episode
of 'Dr. Who'.
I was born into a musical family, so naturally they gave me an
electronics kit for Christmas when I was 12. There was never much hope
for me after that.
I did get to play the flute pretty well, though, and for a while I
worked
as a flute-maker. I still play the first flute I ever made (a bit
agricultural
by modern standards), and I have been teaching flute at
Bath Spa University College for longer than I can remember.
In 1988 I moved from Bath to the wilds of Somerset ("God's Own County"), bought an Atari ST, and the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) system. I thought, not unreasonably, that I would compose electro-acoustic masterpieces with it. As things turned out, I haven't composed anything, but I learned how to program (sort of), and I am now a 'core developer', which means I maintain the source code, test it from time to time, and sometimes write stuff myself. Most of the really interesting code in CDP was written by Trevor Wishart, who now has a very interesting website, and who continues to write electro-acoustic masterpieces.
About Computer Music:
Computer music for some people means sequencers, and MIDI keyboards.
I
have invariably found most of this rather dull. For me, computer music
means
getting down to the bytes and writing programs. This might be in C,
C++,
or the extraordinarily powerful and flexible language
Csound , for which I have added some bits of code of my own, here
and
there. As I live near Bath, I have been most fortunate to get to
know
Prof. John Fitch,
who
maintains the canonical sources for Csound, and with whom I have
written
a couple of research papers. I have also
contributed
the chapter "Designing legato instruments in Csound" to the new
MIT
book on Csound,
'The Csound Book'. More recently still, I have discovered
SAOL, the 'Structured Audio' synthesis language which is part of
MPEG-4. There is a reference implementation, SAOLC, which is slow,
but
free. My Windows build of this (multi-channel enabled), and other
things,
can be found here
. With John Fitch and others, I am contributing to the new Open-Access
NOS-DREAM electro-acoustic media centre at Bath University.
Resources for multi-channel soundfiles and surround-sound.
To work with sound on a computer, you need a portable means of
storing your work on a hard disk. Hence, soundfile formats. There are
really too many
of these, but fortunately most people use the Microsoft
WAVE format, and the
AIFF format, most of the time.
However, the advent of surround sound has lead to the need for
soundfiles containing more than two channels. With Windows98 (SE),
Microsoft have introduced an update to WAVE in the form of the new WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE
(WAVE_EX) file format. This also supports sample formats beyond
16bits. See the NOS-DREAM
WAVE_EX page for a couple of examples - more to come!
I have created a set of free command-line tools for assembling,
disasembling and playing multi-channel files, in the form of the CDP Multi-Channel
Toolkit.
Ambisonic B-Format.
Details of my B-Format specialization of WAVE-EX can be read
here. This file format is supported by the CDP Toolkit. Find out
just how smooth a quad pan can be - driving all four speakers at the
same time!
[to be continued...]
Last updated: April 28, 2004
