4DSOUND Suite
The 4DSOUND Suite is a spatial composition, performance, and sound design environment designed for creating immersive spatial audio through particle-based sound synthesis. The platform enables sculptural sound design with twenty predefined algorithmic shapes generating sound holograms with distinct spatial depth. Built on the NAP framework, it supports live performance workflows, seamless studio-to-installation transfer, and integration with production tools like Ableton, while offering custom shape scripting via Python for advanced spatial manipulation. The software builds on control approaches originally developed for the physical 4DSOUND system, whose earliest installations were arranged in a 16-by-16-metre arena of 16 speaker columns, 48 satellite speakers and nine subwoofers set into the floor, and which has since been used by artists including Stimming, Frank Bretschneider, Max Cooper and Caterina Barbieri, most notably at the MONOM venue in Berlin. At this moment, 4DSOUND is not issuing any R&D Licences. They are working on making the 4DSOUND Suite commercially available.
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history
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4DSOUND began with Paul Oomen, a Dutch composer born in 1983 who studied music composition at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and the Universität der Künste Berlin, and who became fascinated by spatial sound while training there, drawn less to melody than to the subtle spatial energy of sound itself. Oomen founded 4DSOUND Technologies in Amsterdam in 2007, beginning to experiment with the concept the following year and arriving at a first working implementation by 2010. Working independently around the same period, Leo de Klerk developed and patented an omnidirectional loudspeaker capable of producing coherent phantom images in both the vertical and horizontal plane; from 2010 onward, Oomen, sound technologist and lead software developer Poul Holleman, and de Klerk began working together on the system, with Luc van Weelden and Salvador Breed later contributing to its object-based processing software and control interfaces, originally built around Max/MSP and Max for Live. Oomen led the company as Director and Head of Development until 2020, alongside founding the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest in 2015, and has since gone on to head R&D at The Works Research Institute, a laboratory he co-founded to study sound's effects on wellbeing and biodiversity.
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