Wave Field Synthesis DIY
Wave Field Synthesis DIY is an open-source WFS sound reinforcement system built mainly in Max for Windows and macOS. It is intended for practical deployment and experimentation in live performance, supporting live sources, recorded material, synthesis, and OSC-based remote control in frontal or surrounding loudspeaker setups. Built as a low-latency processor aimed specifically at live productions, it's designed to bring down the cost of setting up a WFS system, and can handle up to 64 inputs and 32 outputs depending on the processing power available. It includes practical safeguards for live performance situations, such as automatically reducing level on a nearby speaker when a loud source moves close to it to avoid over-amplification, alongside configurable level maps that can open or close channels depending on a source's position. Manual positioning of sources can be handled through Lemur, and documentation is provided in both French and English.
tech specs
history
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The technique underlying the project, Wave Field Synthesis, was developed in 1988 by Professor A. J. Berkhout at Delft University of Technology, building on the Huygens-Fresnel principle that any wavefront can be treated as a superposition of many smaller spherical waves. This particular WFS DIY system was shared as an open-source project on Cycling '74's Max community forum, distinct from other open WFS efforts such as the Game of Life Foundation's SuperCollider-based WFSCollider, developed by Wouter Snoei since 2004. In discussion around the project, other developers described parallel work building distributed WFS systems using SHARC processors over AVB networks, each handling delay, gain and filtering for groups of individual speakers under central server control, reflecting a broader community interest in scalable, DIY-friendly WFS tools during the same period.
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