On 2012-09-12, Augustine Leudar wrote:
This is a question for those with knowledge of WFS. One of the properties of plane waves propagated with a single line array on a Wavefield synthesis system is that as you walk down the array the sound "follows" you appearing to emanate from the nearest loudspeaker.
Actually, if it seems to do that, you have a very, *very* good WFS system in your hands: that's how planewaves *are*. It's not just that there's some psychoacoustic trick at play. They actually *come* from the same direction regardless of where you are.
The reason you think that is strange and worthy of some psychoacoustic trickery is...well...because it *is* strange: absolutely nothing in nature produces true planewaves. That sort of an auditory parallax is simply unnatural, so that you never hear it it nature, you never got used to it, and so it gives you the heebie-jeebies. The sound "isn't supposed to follow you both along and apart from the array", right?
Well, that's what real planewaves do by design. If your rig is good enough to do that without audible distortion in direction or timbre, then it can do anything else as well in the plane of the speakers (WFS usually being a pantophonic technique, so that it only works in the horizontal plane). It just takes a bit of processing power, then, to render a source that you can walk around with similarly eerie but now realistic auditory parallax. Or two. Or a hundred.
That's then really the whole point of WFS: being able to recreate that eerily realistic parallax which goes along with a full auditory hologram (IOW holophony.) It's just that that then implies the ability to recreate *all* soundfields, no matter how unrealistic, and the possibility that the nerds who made it possible by throwing around planewave mathematics, actually presented you with a planewave through the system. They shouldn't have because it has nothing to do with what your brain can deal with over an extended area, but then of course they fucked with you because they could. ;)
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
