Greg Wilder

Tag: aural imaging

  • 2 Channels Deep

    2 Channels Deep

    Last March I reconfigured the studio to accommodate a wide 4 channel stereo speaker setup.

    I began developing several projects for this front-facing semi-circle, but found they translated horribly when condensed to stereo. Ironically, this was a sign that they were conceived well, but I found it frustrating that they weren’t portable.

    Happily, this March brought with it several studio upgrades along with a return to stereo monitoring.

    Doepfer LMK4+

    In anticipation of future live performances, I upgraded my master controller from the Roland RD-700GX to the Doepfer LMK4+ (TP/40GH).

    Happy fingers. But by far the biggest studio upgrade involved the bits that make the air move — the speakers.

    Adam S2V

    Great googily moogily.

    When I first powered on these Adam S2Vs I couldn’t pull away for hours. They are a miracle of engineering and a revelation for any willing pair of ears.

  • FRB 121102

    FRB 121102

    Sometimes you can’t see the answer, even though it’s sitting right in front of you.

    Such is the case with Fast Radio Bursts, a phenomenon whereby new pattern discovery algorithms are used to analyze old, archival data collected from radio telescopes to uncover information about our universe.

    January 2019 | Fixed Media, Stereo

    FRBs are short, powerful signal bursts and since their discovery in 2007, no one has been able to determine exactly what causes them.

    Some think they’re the result of interactions between large extragalactic objects. Others imagine they point to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. And until recently, they were thought to occur in single instances — as one-offs.

    But since 2012, one particular pattern known as FRB 121102 has been found to be repeating itself (based on dispersion measures and sky position of the original data) and in 2017 researchers pinpointed it’s location.

    It seems FRB 121102 is coming from a dwarf galaxy about three billion light-years from Earth…

  • 4 Channels Wide

    4 Channels Wide

    I spent the last three weeks in Florida working with a 10-speaker dome configuration. But for reasons both musical and practical, I won’t be adopting the dome in my current workflow. At least not today…

    Some of my requirements that prohibit use of the dome include:

    • ease in travel and setup
    • flexibility in performance
    • sharing and distribution (i.e. web playback)

    But most of all, the dome seems best suited to aesthetically-focused acousmatic music. By contrast, the music I create relies heavily on creating the illusion of real acoustic instruments and is otherwise deeply rooted in our vast musical heritage.

    That said, the dome has inspired a few important changes to my studio. Specifically, I’ve expanded the available stereo image with two additional speakers placed roughly at three and nine o’clock.

    I suspect that a more detailed multi-channel image originating from the concert stage can overcome the aforementioned obstacles while providing the desired benefits. So far, my studio experiments have been very promising, but I’ll need to develop some repertoire and try it out in real performance spaces to know for sure…