Marsha Vdovin

It's rare these days to experience sound incorporated as an element into Public Art Works. I'm so very inspired by the impressively large-scale public sound installation by Tony Myatt, and Max/MSP wizard, Oli Larkin of the Music Research Centre (University of York, UK). The Morning Line is a huge outdoor sculpture, concealing a fifty-three speaker sound system driven by Max, which performs multi-spatial compositions by some of the world’s top sound artists.  The Morning Line is touring internationally, currently in Vienna. Oli and Tony were kind enough to take the time during their massive set-up schedule, days before opening, to sit down and go into detail about the creation and technical management of such an ambitious and wonderful public art piece.

Can you give us a brief description of your project?

Tony:  The Morning Line is a very large project, part of a series of art pavilions commissioned by art collector and patron Francesca von Habsburg’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation [T-B A21].

This is the second of four pavilions that she’s planning. It was designed by Matthew Ritchie, and architects Aranda/Lasch, from New York. They also worked with the Advanced Geometry Unit of Arup Engineering.

It began as a project to establish a collaborative structure that could be the basis for a whole variety of new art works. From its very conception — years before we got involved in the project — it was always designed to have a sound element of some sort that would try to unite sculpture with music in some way.

We were approached by T-B A21 in May 2008, who asked us to put together a system that could be a platform for the composers to realize spatial works on The Morning Line, which is a 17-ton outdoor, modular aluminum structure.

We’ve done a lot of work over the years in surround-sound technologies, methods and approaches, particularly on authoring techniques, ways in which people hear surround, and in techniques that can be used to enhance spatial audio perception.

Read Part 2 of this interview for an in-depth discussion of their Surround Concepts.

And this is the system that travels with the sculpture structure?

Correct. We showed it first in Seville at the Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2008. It was on display for a year. This is an outdoor sculpture, by the way, so we’re very grateful for the Meyer MM4XP speakers, which are waterproof. The sculpture traveled to Istanbul last year, as the centerpiece for the European City of Culture festival and was there for six months. We’re just about to open an exhibition here in Vienna, for the next six months, with a music festival of newly commissioned works.

The organization, T-B A21, have commissioned 28 composers now to write works specifically for The Morning Line. Oli, myself, Peter Worth and Dave Malham from the Music Research Centre, have been working with these composers to help them develop their ideas and concepts to be realized on the system and also to help them with the technicalities of working with spatial sound in general.

So we’ve got 10 new composers here whom we’re working with. I think that Francesca von Habsburg and T-B A21’s idea is that the piece will continue to tour and build a body of work over many years. And we’re also hoping to take it to North America at some point.

It’s all so exciting. Who curates the composers?

Tony:  There have been a series of curators. T-B A21 is an art organization that collects contemporary art, so it has its own curators, but it has also commissioned sound curators to put together the music program for each venue.

For the first installation in Seville, Bryce Dessner — who plays guitar in the band The National — curated four works, and also an artist called Florian Hecker, who curated another four.

Russell Haswell curated the Istanbul international program of works, and four Turkish composers were also chosen by the MIAM institute in Istanbul for that exhibition.

For the Vienna installation Franz Pomassl has curated a series of artists including Carsten Nicolai and Christian Fennesz, and several from Eastern Europe.

We’re thrilled to be working with all these people.

So all the material is on the Mac Pro, and then going through Max. Is that correct?

Tony:  Yeah. It’s all generated by our Morning Line patch.

Tony: Maybe one of the largest you’ve ever seen. [Laughs] Certainly one of the largest I’ve ever seen.

And how is the material mixed? Do you use pre-mixed multitrack files?

Tony:  Because we want to make the pieces a multi-polyphonic experience in spatial terms, we don’t want to work with stereo files really. We want to work with all of the independent tracks and channels that a composer might use to put together that piece, so that we can separate out all the elements spatially across the sculpture.

Everything gets mixed on the fly, and also gets spatialized live as the pieces are playing back. So the Mac Pro contains all of the individual sound files that constitute the works. The Max patch sequences all of these sound files, spatializes them, pans them around, locates them, moves them and so on whilst the piece is being played. It’s a key feature of our approach that we can do that.

Oli:  Well, I’ve been using it for I’d say about nine years. And you’ve been using it for quite a long time as well, haven’t you Tony?

Tony:  Well, actually, a few months before we began this project, I moved from PD to Max and since then, I’ve used Max exclusively. So we went straight in with Max 5 for this project.

Are there features in Max 5 that were beneficial to this project?

Oli:. One of the best things about Max 5 for us is the fact that it looks very good on Windows and Mac. We can build standalone applications very easily that work like a normal application on both operating systems.

As well as the software that we have that runs on our Mac Pro, we’ve also developed lots of individual authoring tools in Max. These are applications that allow the artists to import sound files and attach some spatial information to those sound files. Depending on what sound system setup they have in their own studios, they can monitor the sounds in different ways and get an idea of how it’s going to work when it’s actually on the sculpture.

So they can roughly preview their ideas…

 Yes. Of course the sculpture has a completely unique sound system, so it is only a rough idea, but it really helps both us and them to be able to use these tools to quickly generate and audition the spatial data. Once that’s done, when the composer comes to fine tune their work on the actual system, we can then put the files into the Morning Line Engine - the big Max patch that runs on the main system, and it’ll play back all those trajectories alongside the sound files. If the spatialization isn’t quite right we can quickly edit the data in our authoring tools.

Oli:  Yes, I write my own objects, but we use every facet of Max, really. I do a lot of JavaScript stuff, there is some Java in there and we’re using a few of my own objects in C++. It’s great to have this flexibility. Most of the Morning Line software is implemented using standard Max/MSP objects, plus a few third party objects and a few of ours.

Tony:  We’re using Jitter now, as well.

How are you incorporating Jitter into your work?

Tony:  We’re working on a piece with Carsten Nicolai called “Morning Line Quanta”. The concept for it is an auralization of solar wind data. The patch downloads the latest solar wind image from NASA’s SOHO satellite, which is constantly pointed at the sun. Every few hours we get an image of the solar winds that are currently emerging from the sun. Then that data is auralized.

Oli: We use Jitter to download and map a 360 degree radial scan of the image to a new matrix, where each radial scan line from the original image is a column in the matrix and each row indicates a different scan angle.

The pixel data is traversed and auralized using impulse generators, and the dynamics of the impulses are controlled by the content of the pixels. It simultaneously spatializes the impulses, almost as if the sun were at the center of the Morning Line.

Tony: It produces a granular cloud of impulses that rotates around the sculpture and changes in texture every time it is played. It’s a great benefit just to be able to use Jitter to do that sort of thing.

In addition to the things that Oli mentioned, as far as I’m concerned ⎯ as the person running and managing the project in addition to being a programmer ⎯ the speed with which we are able to develop in Max is very important to us. Quite often we have to write patches very quickly in response to requests from artists to do some things that are not regular features of our software, so it’s really important for us to be able to make patches quickly and have a lot of flexibility.

When you’re dealing with something like a 50-channel sound system, being able to just manage all of those audio channels, is really crucial. So the way that we employ poly~ objects, the way that we deal with multi-channel matrices, for example, is really vital for us.

Oli:  Carsten’s piece is an example of one way we can play back sound on the sculpture, but we have this section of the software where we can actually generate a score to sequence the sound files that have trajectories associated with them (what we call spatial audio objects). So that’s one other way in which some of the pieces are realized.

Because everyone has a different approach, using Max allows us to actually write each artist a separate patch to do something specific, which is something that wouldn’t be possible if we ran the system from a conventional DAW. Some of the pieces are algorithmic, some of those are playing back samples more like a typical quadraphonic system, and perhaps certain sounds that have been recorded with Ambisonic microphones and things like this.

You must be discovering a lot from approaching the surround experience from so many points of view.

Tony:  I think one thing that this project has really brought home to me is that the world of surround is in a real mess at the moment. There are no real standards. There are a whole load of different approaches and different methods. Even though DAWs claim to be surround ready, their handling of multichannel formats is often specific to their interpretation of a surround format or method and can be inflexible, only accepting certain “types” of quad file, for example, restricting how multichannel files can be routed, not allowing tracks to have different number of input and output channels etc. DAWs, editors, plug-ins, panners, surround decoders are not joined-up; it can be a nightmare to simply create a good workflow and software environment for surround sound production in a studio – particularly if you want to move outside 5.1 and include height, like with Ambisonics.

What we’re finding is not just about how people work with these different methods in their own studios, but also that some methods are better or worse for certain types of applications. One of the artists we work with, Chris Watson, who’s a UK-based wildlife sound recordist [ed: some may remember him from the band Cabaret Voltaire], has made a piece called Snaefellsnes, which is based on an area in Iceland. He’s recorded quadraphonic sound underwater using hydrophones through to double MS recordings on the giant rocks, moving down the beach, wind through the grasses, mono sounds from beneath glaciers and from inside the volcano at the top of Snaefellsjokull, which, of course, is the volcano in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Just that one piece uses a number of different recording approaches to capture surround. It needs different panners, encoding and decoding techniques and ultimately to be converted and coherently represented on the Morning Line system.

So the fact that we can run patches in Max that do all these things is a really good way of dealing with the integration of different surround sound approaches.

Are there existing Max objects, as opposed to your custom ones, that are predominately used in this project?

Oli:  I’d have to say that poly~ is probably the most important object.

Oli:  Well, for our score-based system, we need to be able to have lots of simultaneous polyphonic sounds in multiple areas of the sculpture, and some of the pieces, I think Florian Hecker’s piece in particular, uses a vast number of different sounds polyphonically, all around the sculpture. So, yeah, without poly~ we’d all have really, really bad RSI [Repetitive Strain Injury].

Tony:  And a lot bigger Max patches, that’s for sure!

I hope it comes out here to San Francisco.

Tony:  We’d like that, but we’ll have to wait and see where T-B A21 can take it next. We’re also linking it with another project now, which is to look more at the authoring end of the surround-sound spectrum with a project that’s going to be based on a ship.

 That’s going to begin this summer, heading over to Iceland and Greenland, and then it’s going to circumnavigate the Americas, and we’re hoping to be doing projects all the way around there, many of which will be in surround sound. We’ve equipped the boat with a similar surround-sound system and surround-sound microphones. The software for the boat sound system is also implemented in Max/MSP.

We’re just about to begin a program of commissioning new works from artists, and also projects from scientists who are interested in marine life, environmental studies and so on.

In addition to the Morning Line, T-B A21 are launching a project in Vienna called the Temporäre Kunsthalle, which is a huge, temporary — by temporary I think they mean five or six years, not a few months — art gallery. The current plans are to focus this exhibition space on sound art works in some of its larger spaces.

So that’s also going to be a very exciting venue to reuse all the things we’ve learnt on The Morning Line, and hopefully generate more works of this sort.

Is your Max patch talking to any sequencing or commercial software packages?

Oli:  No. We do all the sequencing within Max.

Are you using any type of hardware controllers?

Oli:  Well, there is an interactive system built-in to The Morning Line as well, which is based on a Make controller (a microcontroller similar to Arduino). For some of the pieces the artists wanted to detect movement around the sculpture, essentially, to detect when people were near to speakers, and we needed to do that in a way that was weatherproof.

So we developed a system based on the ultrasonic sensors that you get in car-parking-detection systems. We read the digital signal that comes from the sensor units, process that in the Make Controller, and send the data over Ethernet to Max.

That allows us to have the computer quite far away from the sculpture. We thought about doing it with video, but this was the best solution, really. Because they are mass-produced for the auto industry, these sensors are really inexpensive, and replaceable.

Tony:  Also robust. I mean, we rely on the auto industry to do all of our testing for us!

Oli: As well as the interactive system, the Morning Line sound system is actually designed to be controllable remotely via OSC messages. For instance, in some performances artists spatialize live audio input from inside the sculpture using their own computers or hardware controllers.

Have you ever wanted to throw out your patch and start from scratch?

Tony:  Well, we’ve never completely done that. We were very careful to think about our software-engineering approach when we designed the patch, because we knew it was going to be very complicated.

Having said that, there were several aspects that we had to revisit, so that the patch we made for Seville was something where we were experimenting and trying out a lot of these ideas. We then developed it, and started to refine it.

Now it’s pretty much the same as it was when we worked in Istanbul, but we had to address issues of timing, phase coherence and things like that, particularly with poly~, before the Istanbul installation.

We have worked on it for a couple of years, and evolved it rather than throwing it away completely. Quite a lot of it has changed in that period of time… gradually.

The Morning Line is in Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna until November 2011.

The University of York, Music Research Centre

Text interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74.


The Morning Line is a groundbreaking experimental project by artist Matthew Ritchie designed with architects Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU, commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, which explores the interdisciplinary interplays between art, architecture, mathematics, cosmology, music, and science. A platform for contemporary music, it is as much an instrument as a building, saturated with speakers, using a unique interactive ambisonic system.

  It is being exhibited from May 2010 till November in Eminonu Square in Istanbul, as part of its contemporary art programme as the 2010 European Capital of Culture.

The Morning Line -- Istanbul 2010

the-morning-line-part-1

The Morning Line, Part 1

jasch

The ICST Ambisonics tools are a set of externals for full 3D surround audio processing.

In addition to the DSP-objects capable of encoding and decoding Ambisonics signals up to 11th order, the suite includes a GUI and a trajectory control object for the source control in any surround setup.

Under development and in use since 2003 the tools are freely available and work in 32bit and 64bit architectures on Mac and Windows.

Download the package here: https://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=icst_ambisonicsexternals

Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology ICST
Zurich University of the Arts


icst-ambisonics-tools

ICST Ambisonics Tools

Video Trigger is a free standalone motion detector application tailored for media artists. Attach a camera and trigger sounds whenever occupancy is detected in six user-defined areas of the video image. You have complete control over the playback logic and signal routing. Surround is supported, and the source patches are included.

project71-video-trigger

Video Trigger

With the proliferation of inexpensive home theater sound systems and the easy access to surround sound authoring tools, theater-style mixing has become a viable option for the home studio musician. Although the 5.1 format is designed for the traditional cinema approach, with a center channel for dialogue and a subwoofer for effects, the creative musician or sound artist can also subvert the medium for other purposes. For example, in the past, electronic musicians wanting to compose in four-chanel sound have had to struggle with expensive or hard-to-come-by technology. Now it's a simple matter to author a DVD that can play four channels into a quad concert sound system, and even do a reasonable job in many home systems. With a little ingenuity, the 5.1 format can be used for true six-channel sound or for things like stereo sound with multiple click tracks.

For those working more traditionally, several conventions should be noted. First of all, one should set up one's monitoring system in accordance to AES standards. Left and Right speakers are each 30° from center, as in stereo; and the surround speakers are about 110° from center, rather than being true rear speakers. Generally, the center speaker is meant for sounds like dialogue, which benefit from the clarity of a single source. For this reason, one can adopt two different approaches to panning in front. One can pan from left to center to right, for more detailed positioning of virtual sources; or one can pan from left to right, reserving the center for special sounds.

The LFE channel (the .1) often causes confusion. Traditional practice is to use this for low frequency effects only, like earthquakes and explosions. For that reason, compression formats often use a 120Hz low-pass filter on this channel. The playback hardware (subwoofer speaker) serves two purposes, however. The subwoofer does receive the LFE signal, but it usually also serves as a common subwoofer for the low frequencies of all the other speakers. This is because, although the other five positions are theoretically full-range, for practical reasons most sound systems have only one subwoofer, and a system called bass management mixes the low-frequency content of the five speakers together with the LFE signal. Note that, although some software environments and plug-ins offer bass management, it is best to do it in the sound hardware (audio pre-amp or subwoofer electronics), to avoid the risk of doing it twice and since it is, after all, hardware-dependent.

Fold-down compatibility is another consideration. Just as a stereo mix should sound acceptable in mono, it is generally accepted that a 5.1 mix should work when folded down to stereo. Recently there has been somewhat of a trend to provide separate surround and stereo mixes, making fold-down compatibility less important and opening up the possibility of more interesting spatialization effects. However, with the advent of HD Broadcast and the quickly approaching HD DVD, bandwidth restrictions seem to be swinging requirements back to a single downmixable stream only. These broadcast compatibility concerns should make one carefully consider whether to abandon fold-down compatibility completely in choosing an UpMix algorithm. We strongly suggest getting a clear decision on fold-down compatibility (from your client) before you begin a mix.

Cycling '74's UpMix plug-in suite can be used not only to repurpose stereo recordings for traditional theater-type mixing, but also as a rich set of tools for all types of 5.1 mixing.

With the proliferation of inexpensive home theater sound systems and the easy access to surround sound authoring tools, theater-style mixing has become a viable option for the home studio musician. In this article, Les Stuck explains a little about how 5.1 surround-sound works and offers some sage advice about mixing within a 5.1 context.

51-overview

5.1 Overview

Can you share some of these alternative concepts, other then the normal 5.1 /7.1 /10.2 standards?

Oli:  Those formats are cinema formats. Over the last ten years a lot of people in academia have started working with Ambisonics. The University of York’s Music Technology Group has a long history of research into Ambisonic technologies, and we developed some of the first plug-ins for this purpose. Of course many electroacoustic composers work with quadraphonic and octophonic set ups and there are established centers such as GRM in Paris who are famous for doing concerts using orchestras of loudspeakers. There is also wavefield synthesis, which isn’t as common because of the sheer number of speakers required. Both wavefield synthesis and Ambisonics attempt to recreate a soundfield where as the other formats are more concerned with individual speakers.

Tony: But primarily, we’re trying to integrate a series of existing techniques to their best effect. One issue which a former PhD student, Peter Lennox, and I have investigated and published at AES and ICAD conferences, is audio spatial perception and how this might impact the techniques used to create surround which is believable and appeals to our human perception mechanisms – as far as contemporary research in that field might suggest. We’ve looked at new models of perception and considered how developments in perceptual research, psychoacoustics and neuroscience might influence how we think about approaches to the creation of spatial sound.

It seems that spatial information within surround sound content is very important for our ability to hear spatially, as is appealing to our cognitive abilities, what R. L. Gregory refers to as “top-down” knowledge which informs our perception. There are many aspects to these approaches, which are documented in our papers, but as an example: we tend to explore environments to uncover more information about any spatial anomalies we might experience. Any surround system predicated on a sweet spot generally presents the listener with less spatial information when they move. In the generation of works for the Morning Line we try to establish spatial cues across the sculpture, to establish an audio perspective by using multiple sound fields and near, middle and far field loudspeakers. The local surround environment is coherent, but its relationship to far fields can be established by listeners moving. This provides additional information about the location of distant and mid-field sounds as a listener moves through the sculpture, and seems to establish a more cohesive spatial sound experience.

We put those ideas into practice to develop the Morning Line sound system, which consists of 41 small, main speakers and 12 subs, made by Meyer Sound. These are all controlled from a Mac Pro, and run from a very, very large Max patch, that can create, potentially, hundreds of different trajectories of sounds or different sound locations across the structure.

It’s what I’ve been calling a multi-spatial sound system. It’s not like a conventional surround system that just surrounds the audience. It actually has multiple zones and surround cells, so that when you walk through it, you’re able to get a different perspective of the relationship between sounds, and the way that the sounds are spatialized. We’ve published an AES paper on the basic outline of the system and a paper at this year’s ICAD conference about the modular spatial technique.

Can you share some of the trials & tribulations of working in surround?

Oli: One of the main issues for us and many of the artists that we work with is the lack of proper support for the kind of surround work that we do in most digital media formats and DAW software. There are very few DAWs that allow flexible channel routings and this can be a real problem when working with non-cinema surround. Often it is frustrating working with and developing panning plug-ins since most DAWs that do support surround assume you want a particular speaker configuration based on one of the established cinema formats. Hopefully since technologies such as Ambisonics are being used more and more outside of academia, this might change. We feel that surround has much more to offer than what is currently found in cinemas and home cinema setups.

Oli: The Morning Line spatialization system has different goals to other systems, in that normally we are not trying to precisely recreate a soundfield for a listener sitting in a "sweet spot", but rather, to create a flexible, multi-area spatialization platform that works for a variety of artistic approaches, and that can be explored by visitors walking around the sculpture. The sculpture has six areas that we call "rooms". When someone is in one room they will hear what is going on in that room, but also what is happening in the other rooms.

The Morning Line itself is a modular system and it has been in a different configuration for each of the three installations which means that the speaker positions can change. Due to the layout of the rooms we cannot always put speakers in so-called "regular" arrays, which are generally preferred for spatial audio rigs. Four of the rooms are three-dimensional and two are two-dimensional. We have to accommodate these things and therefore we have opted for an approach which can transfer between different setups and that doesn't assume a particular speaker configuration. Mostly we use Ville Pulkki's Vector Based Amplitude Panning, and associate azimuth, elevation and diffusion (sound spread) trajectories to mono audio sources, but our software allows for stereo, linked trajectories too. This data plus the audio is refereed to as a "spatial audio object" SAO file, which can be transferred from one room to another, or used across the whole sculpture.

So in comparison to other systems, in a way, The Morning Line encourages artists to think about the different relationships between sounds in different areas, rather than one area that surrounds the listener. In terms of the actual experience of using the system, it is quite liberating when compared to working in a DAW on a traditional 5.1 system or similar.

Oli: We have found the multichannel audio support in Max/MSP 5 to be very solid, both in terms of playback of many simultaneous hard disk audio tracks using sfplay~ and the interaction with the audio driver. Also the maturity of Max/MSP as a DSP system means that we can accommodate lots of different approaches and have access to a variety of spatialization techniques, many of which have been implemented by members of the Max/MSP community, thanks to the well written and well documented SDK.

Do you have any Max-specific, surround / specialization tips, tricks or warnings?

Oli: When working with complex multi-channel audio in Max/MSP it's appealing to use send~ and receive~ to reduce the number of wires but in the current version you have to be careful about how you use those objects inside poly~, due to two things: stuck buffers when dynamically turning on/off voices and a potential time delay being introduced. Obviously this is very important for our work, since it is crucial to maintain phase coherence and timing between channels. We use the poly.bus~ and poly.send~ externals from CNMAT which work around these issues.

Also, as a further note, when using lot's of sends and receives in a big max patch, it is important to name them methodically and maybe even keep a separate record of the send/receive names and what they're for.

Obviously you don't need to worry about a mono or stereo fold-down, but do the phase relationships of so many sources come into play at all? Are you able to use and manipulate these relationships to your advantage?

Oli: Well, it really depends on the composition. Certainly some composers have deliberately used phase relationships in their pieces for The Morning Line, and we have had to be very conscious of phase issues so as not to produce any unwanted effects.

Tony: We also use Max to do all the things PA System Technicians do to phase compensate loudspeaker arrays and adjust timing and frequency anomalies.

the-morning-line-part-2-surround-concepts

The Morning Line, Part 2: Surround Concepts

Karlheinz Essl

Creating the realtime algorithms for the live-electronics and the surround panning solely form the live input of the toy piano.

whatever-shall-be

Whatever Shall Be

Lilli Wessling Hart

POPULAR PLUG-INS NOW COMPATIBLE WITH INTEL MACS

San Francisco, CA • September 22, 2006 - Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today released Pluggo v. 3.6, Hipno v. 1.1, Mode v. 1.3 and UpMix 1.1 which add Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. The plug-in collections are for RTAS, VST and AU host environments.

Pluggo offers over 100 creative and unusual real-time audio effects and a set of elegant and immediately effective synthesizers and samplers. In addition, users can create custom plug-ins using Max/MSP, Cycling ’74’s award-winning companion authoring software. The Hipno collection is an irresistible mix of granular, spectral, and filter/delay-based plug-ins that feature the unique Hipnoscope morphing interface. The Mode plug-ins combine classic synthesis and effects technique with state-of-the-art performance control, and UpMix, the most recent plug-in package, is a series of immersive 5.1 tools for the surround professional.

Free updates are available for download at https://cycling74.com/downloads

Cycling '74 creates and distributes Mac OS and Windows software and hardware for audio, video, and new media innovators. Products include the Max/MSP/Jitter graphical programming environment, the Pluggo, Mode and Hipno collections of Max/MSP-based audio plug-ins, the Radial loop-based composition and performance system, the Octirama and UpMix advanced surround design tools, and the interactive algorithmic composition program M. Cycling '74 also releases creative musical works through their c74 recording label and audio source libraries for musicians, sound designers and media producers through its Cycles series. https://cycling74.com

Graphics available online at https://cycling74.com/pressimages.

Cycling '74, 379A Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, 415-974-1818, info@cycling74.com

Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today released Pluggo v. 3.6, Hipno v. 1.1, Mode v. 1.3 and UpMix 1.1 which add Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. The plug-in collections are for RTAS, VST and AU host environments. 

cycling-74-releases-entire-line-of-plug-in-products-for-mac-intel

Cycling '74 Releases Entire Line of Plug-in Products for Mac Intel

NAMM • Anaheim, CA • January 19, 2006 - Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today demonstrated UpMix, a surround processing and upmixing software package for VST and RTAS formats on both MacOS and Windows platforms at the Winter NAMM Expo in Anaheim, California. The flagship plug-in, named UpMix, provides functionality that can speed the repurposing of stereo audio content into a surround environment. By providing a number of algorithms and advanced positioning control, UpMix offers an easy way to move stereo files into an immersive surround environment suitable for film, DVD, HD broadcast and music surround formats.

Five additional plug-ins handle common surround mixing tasks:

-Rotator moves a 6-channel mix in a circular fashion – allowing the point of view to follow the on-screen action.

-ReRoute changes the output channels of the audio to match the system's internal routing.

-FoldDown gives you the ability to check your surround mix in stereo, with center channel and surround channel gain reduction.

-ReBalance is a simple set of level controls for each of the surround channels.

-LFE-6chan is a low-frequency generator/adjustor.

These tools provide an unprecedented level of control, but are not intended as a replacement for a skilled engineer. When used as part of an engineer's toolkit, however, they can aid in the creation of a deep, immersive mix. UpMix promises to be a new kind of tool that increases productivity and ease in professional surround production.

UpMix will be available in the first quarter of 2006 from Cycling ’74 and its dealers and distributors. US suggested retail price is $495.

Cycling '74 creates and distributes Mac OS and Windows software for audio, video, and multimedia innovators. Products include the Max/MSP/Jitter graphical programming environment, the Pluggo, Mode and Hipno collections of Max/MSP-based audio plug-ins, the Radial loop-based composition and performance system, the Octirama and UpMix advanced surround design tools, and the interactive algorithmic composition program M. Cycling '74 also releases creative musical and multimedia works through their c74 recording label and audio source libraries for musicians, sound designers and media producers through its Cycles series. https://cycling74.com

Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today demonstrated UpMix, a surround processing and upmixing software package for VST and RTAS formats on both MacOS and Windows platforms at the Winter NAMM Expo in Anaheim, California. The flagship plug-in, named UpMix, provides functionality that can speed the repurposing of stereo audio content into a surround environment. By providing a number of algorithms and advanced positioning control, UpMix offers an easy way to move stereo files into an immersive surround environment suitable for film, DVD, HD broadcast and music surround formats. 

cycling-74-shows-surround-processing-and-up-mixing-technology

Cycling '74 Shows Surround Processing And Up Mixing Technology

Robert Henke

The four laser projectors are controlled by generative Max patches, creating constantly morphing shapes of light. The Max patches run on two computers, each of them controlling two lasers, and  a third computer runs Max4Live to generate sound, using algorithmic MIDI sequencers that play notes and parameters of several instances of the Max4Live Granulator synthesizer.  The Max patches and Max4Live talk to each other via a simple UDP network. A lot of gen~ is involved both for synthesis and for the generation of the visual shapes. The visual shapes are basically complex vector graphics, calculated as audio signals  at 96kHz and then transmitted to a multichannel DA converter that controls the brightness and color of the laser sources and the movement of the galvanometers inside the laser projectors. 

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