(support material for the research  --  City+2023@Perth International Conference)

 Production process (Figure 1):

For the success and efficiency of the experiment, the spatial directions of the 360 camera and the ambisonic recorder must be spatially calibrated and have a timecode for synchronization: Ambisonic sound / 360 video

The plugin O3A Flare screen applies a rectangular  area which shows us a spherical surface spread over a surface  with the specification of the actual directions  (i.e., left, right, above, below, front, ba and ck for back) .

The peculiarity of these displays is that it shows us the direction of the sound but also its frequency as well as its amplitude.

The peculiarity of the 360 video and 3D ambisonic sound recording is that whatever the camera angle, the whole soundscape is recorded, then sound visualizations can be interactively navigated through. In fact, for each recording location a first angle of view is suggested according to the path of the recorder, but the strength of this method is the “freedom” to scale up in all directions in the 3D space (sounds, videos).

This plugin uses simple first order estimates of the predominant sound direction in a range of frequency bands. Note that some color coding has been implemented. The frequency color coding is as follows:

• From red to magenta as  20 Hz to 20 KHz.

This method keeps the background grids and orientations visible during the video analysis, and by cross-comparing it with some acoustic camera (Figure 2)

Regarding the videos shown below the audio is converted in binaural format to let the users perceive the spatial sound in 2 channels.