CNMAT's Music and Technology Seminar

"New Directions in Spatial Audio"
- James A. Moorer
- Novato, California

The multi-channel music revolution is upon us. The difference between stereo music and multi-channel music is as great or greater than the difference between stereo and mono. This naturally begs the question of how we are to record and produce multi-channel music. This lecture will focus on one approach, which is to drive the speakers in such a manner that the spherical harmonic expansion of the sound field at the listener's head is made as close as possible to the desired sound field. The inverse problem of how to make wide-band microphone arrays of arbitrary directionality has recently been solved, and will be presented here (world premiere!).

James A. Moorer is the Senior Founder and Director of Advanced Development at Sonic Solutions. He personally designed and wrote much of the SonicSystem™ and developed the advanced DSP algorithms for the NoNOISE process which is used to restore vintage recordings for CD remastering. To date, NoNOISE has been used in the production of over 50,000 CD's. While Vice-President of Research and Development at Lucasfilm DroidWorks between 1980 and 1987 he designed the Audio Signal Processor ASP which was used in the production of sound tracks for "Return of the Jedi", "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", and others. Between 1977 and 1979, he was a researcher and the Scientific Advisor to IRCAM in Paris. In the mid-seventies he was Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1975.
In 1990, he received the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Silver Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 1999 he received the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences Scientific and Engineering Award for his pioneering work in the design of digital signal processing and its application to audio editing for film.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2001, 11:00pm to Wednesday, November 14, 2001 1:00am