Spatosc: Providing Abstraction for the Authoring of Interactive Spatial Sudio Experiences

Creating an interactive project that deals with 3-D sound becomes difficult when it needs to run in multiple venues, due to a diversity of loudspeaker arrangements and spatialization systems. For effective exchange, there needs to be a standardized approach to audio spatialization with a unified, but abstract way of representing 3-D audio scenes. Formats from the gaming and multimedia communities are appealing, but generally lack the features needed for spatial audio performance and interactive new media. Experimental features need to be supported, including things like support for multiple listeners, complex sound directivity, ability to accurately model acoustics, and providing fine controls for tuning spatial effects such as Doppler shift, distance attenuation and filtering. Our solution to the problem was to develop an open source C++ library called SpatOSC, which can be included in existing visualization engines, audio development environments, and plugins for digital audio workstations. Instead of expecting that everyone adopts a new spatial audio format, our library provides an immediate solution, with “translators” that handle conversion between representations. A number of spatializers are already supported, with an extensible architecture that allows others to be developed as needed.