Spatial Audio

The work with spatial audio has grown almost naturally out of my interests in algebraic geometry. The work is centered around algorithmic spatialization. Waveguide meshes are modeled from projections of higher dimesional algebraic and geometric structures. At this moment the work is realized as very large Pure Data externals. Encoding to ambisonics happens directly in the objects.

Various Work

Akerselvas Sang
Made in Oslo, at Notam, september 2022. The sound is based on a mono recording of the Aker river, a river which runs down through Oslo, and passes right behind the Notam studio. Techniques include some substractive synthesis and large waveguide meshes for resonance and spatialization

Binaural rendering, only for headphones:

Stereo:

Akeren Notam

17-19
Harmonic structures from the numbers 17 and 19. Recorded for 7th order ambisonics - 6min01
Finished 2022 January.

Binaural rendering for headphones:

Stereo version:

Syntropy 77, Binaural rendering of composition for 5th order ambisonics - 5min15

The compositional structure for this piece was made winter 2021. But it is here reworked at the IEM summer 2021. Spatialization is realized through the Simplex23 waveguide mesh described on the IEM blog. The piece explores harmonic structures generated from the numbers 7 and 11, which usually do not have a place in traditional tuning systems. The synthesis has bits af quasicrystal waveforms, non-periodic order.

IEM 2021 Graz

7sphere Revisited, I revisited the world of the octonions and refined the tools. The unit length octonions make up the unit 7sphere. In a way one could say that this is a field recording on the 7sphere. I know that things are well behaved within a certain framework, but the way it is set up, then there are always new things to encounter. The piece was played at ICMC 2022 Limerick and a few more places.

Stereo :

Binaural :

Entartung Entkörperung Entgeistigung, The harmonic structure for this piece started by looking at some tiny fragments from Arnold Schönberg's opus 23 which is now written exactly 100 years ago. After that the movements transformed much and got woven into a microtonal spectral structure. Anyway, every time I look at some of Schönberg's music I perceive that he has had premonitions of jazz to come up through the century. So maybe that is what it became: little echos of distant premonitions. The text is by Rudolf Steiner, from lectures 1916 and 1917. So the piece brings together some very different, both highly visionary, aspects of Austrian culture. Voice: Jannick Knyrim. text and English translation

Stereo :

Binaural :

E8 work in progress_ The E8 is a mathematical object which was discovered more than 100 years ago. But just the last few decades it has become very popular among physicists who try to use it to explain various mysteries. Algorithmically the 'sound test' follows more or less what is happening in this animation: Gosset polytope - E8 - 3D projections .

Stereo :

Binaural :

picture of the IEM CUBE. Studio for spatial audio. My greatest thanks to the IEM institute for letting me work there the summer of 2021

CCRMA 2020 Stanford

7sphere Karma, 2020, practically everything in this piece is generated with the 8 dimensional octonion algebra. FM synthesis plays an important role, here octonion orbits are modulating the phases of other octonion orbits. The piece was made during a stay at CCRMA, Stanford
binaural:

Syntropy 7times8, 2020, A spectral composition
binaural:

Efflux, 2019, The 6 dimensional hypercube rotated and projected onto 3D creates the resonant framework, the synthesis has bits from mathematical quasicrystals
binaural: