WFSCollider
WFSCollider is the driving software behind the Wave Field Synthesis system of the Game Of Life Foundation. It lets users place sound sources within a two-dimensional field, moving them along a trajectory or a function, holding them steady in the room, or manipulating them live. Built as an adapted class library of SuperCollider, it functions as a full digital audio workstation in its own right, with a timeline editor, effect chains and real-time live control — no prior SuperCollider knowledge is needed for everyday use, though the underlying language remains fully scriptable for anyone who wants it. Sounds and sound processes are placed on a timeline and saved into project files, and the whole system is free and open source under the GPLv3 licence.
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Wave Field Synthesis itself dates back to 1988, when Professor Berkhout at Delft University of Technology developed the technique from a much older idea: the 17th-century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens' principle that any wavefront can be understood as the sum of many smaller spherical waves. The Game Of Life Foundation was founded by composer Arthur Sauer to build a practical system around this theory, and the resulting WFSCollider software was developed between 2006 and 2011 primarily by Miguel Negrão and Wouter Snoei, with further contributions from R. Ganchrow and J. Truetzler. The foundation's system in The Hague uses the software to drive an array of 192 loudspeakers arranged in a 10 by 10 metre square, and WFSCollider is now distributed as a Quark within the standard SuperCollider Quarks collection, with its source code openly available on GitHub.
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