Girafe - A versatile Ambisonics and binaural system

Girafe aims at being a versatile, modular software system for
realising projects using Ambisonics or the binaural virtual Ambisonics
approach.  Girafe is implemented as a set of unit generators and
classes for the Supercollider sound programming environment.  Girafe
eventually will evolve into a flexible toolkit for audio augmented
environments.  It is targeted at both artistic applications in the
field of interactive, virtual acoustics, as well as a tool for
scientific research in spatial audio and its artistic applications.

Currently, Girafe is in the designing stage of its basic Ambisonic
functionality.  It makes extensive use of the powerful, flexible
multichannel routing capabilities of scsynth, the Supercollider
server, which turns out to be very efficient for HOA systems of
different orders and numbers of (virtual) speakers.  In combination
with sclang, Supercollider's multi-paradigm programming language,
large groups of channels can be handled very conveniently.

Girafe's basic idea is to develop a modular, extensible, open source
system, which should allow for an easy implementation and integration
of recent research results.  It should simplify the verification of
these results in hearing test series, as well as their reflection in
an artistic context.  Girafe is motivated by the observation, that
many recent approaches in the field of (binaural) Ambisonics research
are not easily available to practical verification, comparative
assessment, nor artistic exploration.

The presentation will give an overview over Girafe's aims and will
discuss its current design attempts for the implementation and
integration of Ambisonic operations with Supercollider.