page_title: Wave field synthesis
section_title: Research and market maturity
hierarchical_section_title: Wave field synthesis / Research and market maturity
caption_attribution_description: 13 November 2006 A wavefront synthesis speaker array in Eindhoven. More than 200 speakers are controlled by two quad processor G5s. The G5s are attached to MOTUs which individually control every speaker. Each speaker is also amplified separately. The G5 is running all of this with SuperCollider.
context_page_description: Wave field synthesis is a spatial audio rendering technique, characterized by creation of virtual acoustic environments. It produces artificial wavefronts synthesized by a large number of individually driven loudspeakers. Such wavefronts seem to originate from a virtual starting point, the virtual source or notional source. Contrary to traditional spatialization techniques such as stereo or surround sound, the localization of virtual sources in WFS does not depend on or change with the listener's position.
context_section_description: Early development of WFS began 1988 at Delft University. Further work was carried out from January 2001 to June 2003 in the context of the CARROUSO project by the European Union which included ten institutes. The WFS sound system IOSONO was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for digital media technology (IDMT) by the Technical University of Ilmenau in 2004.
  The first live WFS transmission took place in July 2008, recreating an organ recital at Cologne Cathedral in lecture hall 104 of the Technical University of Berlin. The room contains the world’s largest speaker system with 2700 loudspeakers on 832 independent channels.
  Research trends in wave field synthesis include the consideration of psychoacoustics to reduce the necessary number of loudspeakers, and to implement complicated sound radiation properties
  so that a virtual grand piano sounds as grand as in real life.
caption: 2-dimensional placement of wavefront synthesis speaker arrays.
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