Astral Plane
Astral Plane is an intelligent system that employs Ambisonics to enable audio spatialization for live performances, especially with Ableton Live.
- Object audio (each track in Live is a Sound Object.)
- Synced up with Live using Ableton Link.
- Control object positions and movement patterns using OSC.
- Extracts audio features to create interesting mappings based on audio content (coming soon!)
Prerequisites
- Ableton Live 9.6+
- Max 7
- Soundflower v 2.0b2
- HOALibrary for Max (https://github.com/CICM/HoaLibrary-Max). Place the package folder in the Max packages folder. (What a phenomenal library, kudos to these guys!)
Setup
- Set the audio output in Ableton to Soundflower (64ch)
- Set the audio input in Max to Soundflower (64ch)
- The audio objects are sequentially arranged, therefore choose the output of each track in Live accordingly (As of now 4 channels). For example, set track 1 to output to channel 1 and it assigns it as the first sound object.
- Switch on Link.
- If you're a Lemur user, you can use the the patch provided. (set your IP in the app and set the port to 7001.)
- Open AstralPlane.maxpat
Use
- The system can be used with any application capable of transmitting OSC. The routes can be found in the AstralPlane.Control.maxpat. I use it with Lemur.
- For testing purposes, there are controls provided in the patch.
Trajectories & Rate
- There are two trajectories implemented as of now, Ellipse and Lissajous curve.
- User can set the origin of an object and the object will move in selected trajectories about that origin.
- User can adjust parameters to get different curves (a, b, magnitude).
- There are three Sync Modes Bar, Beat (sub-divions of Bar) and Free.