HOA Library
HOA Library allows musicians and composers to synthesize, transform and render sound fields in a creative and artistic way. This library facilitates the understanding and the appropriation of key concepts of ambisonics. Built as a collection of C++ classes, FAUST functions and native objects, it offers original processing techniques such as diffuse sound field synthesis, perspective distortion and spatial filtering, alongside custom graphical interfaces, and is available for Pure Data, Max, openFrameworks, FAUST and Csound, as well as VST plugins. Core objects include hoa.encoder~ for encoding a signal into the circular harmonics domain, hoa.decoder~ for decoding an ambisonic sound field to configurations ranging from full ambisonic and binaural to 5.1, stereo or irregular loudspeaker layouts, and hoa.rotate~ for rotating the sound field, all released as free, open-source software under the GNU General Public Licence.
tech specs
history
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HOA Library was developed by Julien Colafrancesco, Pierre Guillot and Eliott Paris at the CICM, the centre for research on musical composition and computer science at the University of Paris 8, as part of the LABEX Arts H2H programme at MSH Paris-Nord and the Arts-Sciences-Technologies platform. Guillot's own 2013 master's thesis on musical processing in ambisonics fed directly into the project, and that same year the team published the first paper describing the library for Max/MSP, Pure Data, VST and FAUST. The library continued to be developed and refined for several years afterwards, adding features such as binaural rendering, tutorials and an Ambisonics format converter in later releases, before eventually being marked as deprecated by the CICM in favour of newer spatial audio tools.
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