Synthesis of Directionality by Corpus

Aaron Einbond's artistic residency focuses on the cohabitation of instrumental and synthetic sounds in a diffusion space.The playing of an instrumentalist on stage is captured and analyzed in real time: different audio descriptors (timbral) are computed and exploited to produce electronics by concatenative synthesis by corpus (realized by CataRT-MuBu). The question of the diffusion of the samples (grains) of the corpus is then raised. For this purpose, we use a compact array of IKO loudspeakers, which allows us to simulate radiation patterns (described by their representation in third order spherical harmonics). The radiation patterns used here are selected from a directivity database of (historical and modern) acoustic instruments measured and made available by TU Berlin: the audio descriptors (from the player's playing) are used to select one (or more) instruments from the TU database in order to apply their directivity pattern to the grains. The underlying idea is not to faithfully reproduce the spatial radiation of instruments, but to give the synthesized sounds a "natural, plausible" spatiality, so that the electronics merge harmoniously with the acoustic instruments present on stage.