Mounted on the walls just above the first floor level in the transforming performance room is a giant planar speaker. It runs around all four walls of the room, and is made up of nothing more than ordinary good quality speakers stacked together side by side, meter after meter after meter. This allows artists to synthesize otherwise impossible auditory effects, like a performance in which you hear different pieces in different parts of the room, through ridiculously complex wave transformation calculations. I was told that IRCAM drives this with a supercomputing system, required to be able to run the performance in real-time. Apparently, IRCAM has been in supercomputing since its beginning, when they acquired one of the first Cray supercomputers ever allowed to be exported outside of the United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment