Miguel Negrão: Real time wave field synthesis

Live blogging the sc symposium. I showed up late for this one.
He’s given a summary of the issues of wave field synthesis (using two computers) and is working on a sample accurate real time version entirely in supercollider. He has a sample-accurate version of SC, provided by Blackrain.
The master computer and slave computer are started at unknown times, but synched via an impulse. The sample number can then be calculated, since you know how long it’s been since each computer started.
All SynthDefs need to be the same on both computers All must have the same random seed. All buffers must be on both. Etc. So he wrote a Cluster library that handles all of this, making two copies of all in the background, but looking just like one. It holds an array of stuff. Has no methods, but sends stuff down to the stuff it’s holding.
Applications of real time Wave Field Synthesis: connecting the synthesis with the place where it is spatialized. He’s ding some sort of form of spectral synthesis-ish thing. Putting sine waves close together, get nifty beating, which creates even more ideas of movement, The position of the sine wave in space, gives it a frequency. He thus makes a frequency field of the room. When stuff moves, it changes pitch according to location.
This is an artificial restriction that he has imposed. It suggested relationships that were interesting.
the scalar field is selected randomly, Each sine wave oscillator has (x, y) coords. The system is defined by choosing a set of frequencies, a set of scalar fields and groups of closely tunes sine wave oscillators. He’s used this system in several performances, including in the symposium concert. That had maximum 60 sine waves at any time. It was about slow changes and slow movements.
His code is available http://github.com/miguel-negrao/Cluster
He prefers the Leiden WFS system to the Berlin one.