Spat~
Spat~ is a real-time spatial audio processor that allows composers, sound artists, performers, and sound engineers to control the localization of sound sources in 3D auditory spaces. In addition, Spat provides a powerful reverberation engine that can be applied to real and virtual auditory spaces. Rather than modelling a room's physical geometry, the reverberation engine follows a perceptual approach, splitting the generated response into four temporal segments, the direct sound, early reflections, late reflections and a diffuse reverberation tail, each filtered independently and spatially distributed according to a space-time model derived from IRCAM's own acoustics research. It's built as a modular library of objects running inside Max/MSP, and supports playback over binaural and transaural headphone reproduction as well as multichannel loudspeaker systems, with headphone realism further improved when interfaced with a head-tracking device.
tech specs
history
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The Spatialisateur project started in 1991 as a collaboration between the French company Espaces Nouveaux and IRCAM, growing out of research at IRCAM's own room acoustics laboratory into the objective and perceptual characterisation of concert-hall sound quality, alongside digital signal processing research carried out at Télécom Paris. Jean-Marc Jot developed the underlying Feedback Delay Network reverberation architecture, while Jean-Pascal Jullien and Olivier Warusfel led the perceptual side of the work, identifying a small set of subjective listening parameters that could be used to control the artificial reverberator intuitively. The tool took shape as Spat~, a Max object built to organise and optimise the experimental patches developed under the Spatialisateur project for musicians and researchers working in Max/MSP, and has remained in continuous development ever since, marking two decades of ongoing evolution by the time Carpentier, Noisternig and Warusfel documented its state in a 2015 conference paper. Spat~'s technology later found its way beyond IRCAM's own environment when the French company FLUX:: ported it into a full DAW-integrated production suite, Spat Revolution.
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