#quadraphonics

[clark-sons]

[vintage-tech]

Things I can't picture: how an artist whose music sounds best in mono on AM radio could benefit from being in quad.

[stone-cold-groove]

Stereo Review Magazine - October 1971.

[twoquad]

Quad test was successful. :3 The overarching plan is to use the modular for sound generation and VCV for sequencing and routing/panning, working up to using four voices, as that's what the interface I'm using will work with. Next steps include: - Rethink and then overthink everything about speaker placement. - Build two more stands for the speakers currently on the desk, as they're too close together - Find my book of notes and do some work on sequencing for the NSYNTHI quad panner, it's a pretty groovy little module and will be central (haha) to the whole project - Make a chorus out of a delay and LFO module so I can replicate them and have one for each speaker, quad chorus, baby! - Make a binaural mic, I should probably do this sooner rather than later so I can record sound for video... - Fix the scaling on my oscillators, it's been months and a move since I did it last, the poor babies! - Consider some room treatment??? - Relearn the psychoacoustics necessare to make things sound nlike they're coming from outside the circle of speakers, or cheat and buy the VCV plugin host module and do it with the TDL Distance plugin, lols.

For a first check if the concept is sound, I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

[auberylis]

gonna make a sampler when i take on my proprietary-formatted modular system for real. gonna make it run on an atmega16 with an actual SRAM chip to record/playback from. No teensies and SD cards and whatever the heck else

[myost]

[now-playing] - aerosmith - get your wings - 1974

[selidor]

[forastic]

COZYSPACE

Patrick and I made COZYSPACE.

It’s my first year of grad school and I was confused about what I was supposed to be working on, how I was supposed to be working on it...

The digital arts and new media mfa that I’m in is like an understaffed makerspace inside a university.

I had an idea for a much edgier, weirder thing to make for school. I realized after working through it and talking about it that I was making it for the program, for the university, for other people. Undergrad basically ruined me psychologically and what I really needed was to chill out. I came up with an art project about me chilling out: a 4 channel ambient music with 3D shapes bouncing around, and a Super Nintendo controller that can affect them. I started building it in Unity as a proof of concept.

There’s a church in Santa Cruz at the center of a series of roads in concentric circles.

In the center of those circles is a church, and that church is getting torn down (to make space for housing). The owner of the church gave access to the building to a local arts collective until it gets destroyed. That collective, Liminal Space, put a call out to artists for art, installations, and murals, for a one-night party called Northern Lights that doubles as a send-off for the church. Patrick and I heard about it and decided to bring COZYSPACE to life there, first.

I was planning on building a final version in Unreal 5, but learning the software was too much of a learning curve for me in the time constraints, so I continued to build it in Unity.

My first build I used a package of ‘low poly clouds’ as the shapes. Here’s a video of the first build of COZYSPACE.

The shapes weren’t cozy though. I actually really liked the flat surfaces and hard edges, but it didn’t fit the theme. I asked Patrick to design the shapes, so he built them in VR using a sculpting program.

I changed the motion slightly and mapped the controls to a Super Nintendo controller. After adding controls and a ridiculous amount of bloom in the high definition render pipeline, it looked like this.

It was projected onto the ceiling with 2 projectors playing the same visuals, slightly overlapping. The vignette removed the hard edge of the projectors, giving the installation a more organic feeling. The person interacting is able to change the speed of the objects and the rate of rotation. They are also able to add and remove objects, both large and small. When removing large objects there is a particle effect that appears as either slow motion fireworks or a weird fuzzy phasing jittery thing, which just happens when you change some settings in the trails. The lights are also changeable. There are 3 lights at different points in the scene. While holding a button they all rotate around the center of the scene. Another button shifts the hues of all 3 lights.

My desire was to give the user control over both elements of sound and game at the same time, but it turns out getting quadrophonic sound to work in Unity is a nightmare on Windows. Unity defaults to the Windows audio driver, which didn’t work great with the Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 audio interface that I was using. In other software I was able to process the audio through ASIO, and that worked great with the audio interface. There were plugins to get Unity working with ASIO, but they were old and kind of confusing and expensive.

I ended up running the audio through Ableton Live for the first installation, mixing the tracks down to wav files to make it easier on my processor. They were about a 2 minute loop, but they were simple and background-y enough that they didn’t get old being in the space. Here’s a link to the ones that I used for the first installation. A nearby installation had ambient music that was ‘all black keys’ so I retuned my ambient stuff to g flat major. I actually have a much better more seamless method for looping, but I didn’t implement it this time because I ran out of time and kinda forgot about it. This means that the beginning of each loop gave a little bit of unintended punctuation.

Patrick built projector stands so that they would shoot out at angles that worked best with the space and projectors.

We worked together on painting the space, using Patrick’s designs from BEARPAD. He freehanded a couple of bubs on the walls and I added some blobby colors around them. 

We also projected the classic HANG 10 design onto one end of the room, painting the lines where they fell to give it an optical illusion that only looked right from one spot. Otherwise the lines were skewed.

We bought some rugs from my favorite thrift store, Grey Bears, and cut out fun blobby shapes. The remnants of the rugs were nailed down to the edges of the room. We took one of the doors outside and Patrick spray painted on them, experimenting with freehand lines with spray paint for the first time. There was a couch and a chair in one room downstairs that we hauled up to the room. We also sourced a couple of oversized bean bags from a friend up in San Francisco. They’re honestly enormous and almost didn’t fit in my car.

The event went really well! Here’s some pictures and a video compilation.

The projectors provided almost all of the light for the space, so the person controlling the game environment also ended up controlling the lighting in the room as well. I have a list of notes and potential changes from that night that I hope to get to someday. Since I’m considering doing this for my thesis I’ll have a lot to work with.

[lukekini]

A pre-dinner cocktail in the Quadraphonic Lounge 🍹🗿📀🎶 #quadraphonic #cocktails #stereo #quadraphonicsound #audio #music #vintagetech https://www.instagram.com/p/CnvNiUFOWRb/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[fatrabbitky]

Super cool vintage Pioneer QX-949 Quadraphonic Receiver. Unfortunately only the left channels seem to be alive, so it’s a project receiver. These are pretty hard to find and sell for a couple hundred bucks just for parts. Cabinet is in great shape and it’s not missing any knobs of buttons. All displays seem to light up well. $50 AS IS. #pioneer #quadraphonic #vintageelectronics #fatrabbitky (at Fat Rabbit Thrift & Vintage) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkQ3fs_MT5X/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[clark-sons]

[vinylespassion]

Dual quadraphonic sound system, 1973.

[stone-cold-groove]

From the classic audio files: the Sansui 4-channel receiver line - 1975.

[wilwheaton]

But have you ever heard the original Alan Parsons quadraphonic mix (not the much later James Guthrie 5.1 mix) of "The Dark Side of the Moon"? It's indescribably fun. Gimmicky in a way that wouldn't work for very many other albums, but perfectly appropriate for that one.

I have, and it is a masterpiece.

[gubbles-owo]

if folks on Terra regularly have two pairs of ears, then like. how do they hear. how do they hear. what does it sound like. i NEED to know. I'm no biology expert, but the primary disadvantage I can think of with human ears is their inability to tilt, adjust, or otherwise move to better spatialize sound. we have to tilt our heads around to get a sense of where the heck a particular sound might be originating from, and even then it's far from infallible. higher frequencies with very short wavelengths are notoriously difficult to locate, and lower sub-bass frequencies with very long wavelengths can sometimes suffer a similar phenomenon. slapping on a second pair of animal ears on an otherwise human head might help in alleviating these issues. many are able to move around, and typically detect frequencies outside of the standard human range of around 20Hz to 20kHz. the bit I don't get tho? they all seem to face forward. like, if you're going to evolve to double the amount of ears, wouldn't it be optimal for the 2nd set to be aligned backwards for fuller coverage?? or at least in SOME different direction. like sure, they have a range of movement to work with, but I can't imagine having a 2nd pair of ears that, at rest face the same direction as my existing ones. it sounds like a recipe for needless sensory overload... r-right?? this has real "three dimensional idiot atttempts to grasp four dimensional space" vibes LMFAO my former specialty was doing music/audio, and the whole concept of binaural audio is super interesting. heck I made my own goddamned edit of carameldansen to try and really make it sound like it was blaring on the other side of your wall. but what the heck would that sound like to april? does she listen to her music with standard headphones while the bnnuy ears are still keeping tabs on her environment? is she forever cast from the basic human pleasure that is shutting out the world via total replacement with blasting music? do they even make 4-driver headphones, or even mix audio in quadraphonic format? does 2-channel stereo music, to them, lack the same sense of depth and space that music summed to mono sounds like to us??? arknights not only refuses to answer any of these (to my knowledge), but instead laughs and spits on my face yet more questions

april. wh-what. kind of earplugs. do you have four of them or is it just two. are either pair like. human sized. please do not shove corn cob-sized earplugs into my head they will NOT fit

[myost]

[now-playing] - the o'jays - ship ahoy - 1973