Triple Piano Preview (Patreon)

It's that time of year, winter break for my academic collaborators! 

Every winter my friend and coauthor Henry Segerman comes to visit and we work on a project or two. Two years ago my research team was still focused on spherical video, and we planned to use Henry's geometric topology expertise to play with transformations of the video sphere.

Some projects related to that work ended up finished and published, as you can see in Henry's post about Möbius transformations for spherical video (check out the included video to see the transformations in action!): http://elevr.com/spherical-video-editing-effects-with-mobius-transformations/

After Möbius transformations Henry started playing with other transformations and effects, and we did some tests for how to map multiple spheres of video onto a single sphere. One of the tests, which the included image demonstrates, creates three copies of the same space that flow seamlessly together around a sphere, with just two singularities. We planned that it would be fun to create a round that shifts these copies of the room in time and has some other stuff going on in the background, and then break was over and we left it for the following year.

The following winter, though, we had more exciting projects... with physicist Sabetta Matsumoto added to the mix, we focused on getting new hyperbolic spaces working in VR. That work ended up being covered by New Scientist and the New York Times so it was a good choice!

But this year we want to get back to that spherical piano round idea, and so we've been collaborating remotely on the planning stages and Henry will be flying in next week to start production.

In the two years since we started thinking about this project, YouTube started accepting Ambisonic B-format audio for spherical videos, something I've been advocating since I did some research on VR sound in 2014 (see http://elevr.com/audio-for-vr-film/ )

Basically, it's like having stereo sound but on a sphere, and instead of just being able to pan sounds from one ear to the other as you look around, you can rotate the entire sphere of sound in 3D. This is useful if, for example, you've got three pianos around the sphere and want each piano's sound to come from the right spot.

While I appreciate the mathematical and functional simplicity of ambisonic sound, I had no idea how to actually make it, especially since I wanted to produce it based on placing sound sources in space rather than using a live recording made with an ambisonic mic. Back then there weren't a lot of tools, and no spherical video player had actually implemented playback of it. 

But things are different now and I should be able to do it... might take some extra post-production time as I learn new software and export/upload settings and do tests and etc. But learning ambisonic sound production has been on my to-do list since I wrote that post in summer 2014 so it's good to have an excuse to sit down and do it! Once I've got this working I'll be able to have all sorts of musical fun, and probably write a follow-up to that old blog post.

Oh, and as I learn the new software and hardware setups I'm gonna need, here's one of my (non-ambisonic) test recordings: https://soundcloud.com/vihartvihart/here

I've been using Audacity exclusively for at least 15 years but I'm finally moving up in the world... first step, Reaper! Learning new software is hard! 

Between that and the composition and choreography of the video itself, I've got my hands full. Hopefully we'll be able to do it in the time we have, but if not, there's always next year :D