Creating Surround Sound
Surround sound is created in several ways. The first and simplest method is using a surround sound recording microphone technique, and/or mixing-in surround sound for playback on an audio system using speakers encircling the listener to play audio from different directions. A second approach is processing the audio with psychoacoustic sound localization methods to simulate a two-dimensional (2-D) sound field with headphones. A third approach, based on Huygens' principle, attempts reconstructing the recorded sound field wave fronts within the listening space; an "audio hologram" form. One form, wave field synthesis (WFS), produces a sound field with an even error field over the entire area. Commercial WFS systems, currently marketed by companies sonic emotion and Iosono, require many loudspeakers and significant computing power.
The Ambisonics form, also based on Huygens' principle, gives an exact sound reconstruction at the central point; less accurate away from center point. There are many free and commercial software available for Ambisonics, which dominates most of the consumer market, especially musicians using electronic and computer music. Moreover, Ambisonics products are the standard in surround sound hardware sold by Meridian Audio, Ltd. In its simplest form, Ambisonics consumes few resources, however this is not true for recent developments, such as Near Field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics. Some years ago it was shown that, in the limit, WFS and Ambisonics converge.
Finally, surround sound also can be achieved by mastering level, from stereophonic sources as with Penteo, which uses Digital Signal Processing analysis of a stereo recording to parse out individual sounds to component panorama positions, then positions them, accordingly, into a five-channel field. There are however more ways to create surround out of stereo, for instance with routines based on the QS and SQ Quad routines, where instruments were in the studio divided over 4 speakers. This way of creating surround with software routines is normally referred to as "upmixing".
Read more about this topic: Surround Sound
Famous quotes containing the words creating, surround and/or sound:
“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
—Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
“Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)