Multichannel setup in the Portal

“The Portal” is a room at the Music Technology campus in Fjordgt.1, originally designed for the two-campus program “Music, Communication and Technology” that NTNU and UiO had running from 2018-2022. During the fall I have been working with a new spatial audio setup for the room. The previous setup was a small ring with eight Genelec 8020D loudspeakers, about 2.5 meters in diameter, covering only a small part of the room. My aim was to have a setup with a much larger listening zone (and sweet spot), including also a height dimension. With 16 Genelec 8030A speakers to my disposal, the solution I chose was to locate the speakers close to the walls in two heights.

Although the aim was to have a relatively symmetric setup, the layout of the room and the equipment in it forced a number of compromises. Still, when testing the setup with different sound material decoded in up to 5th order ambisonics, the result was quite good.

The students taking the course ‘Electronic Music’ (MUST3054) at the NTNU Master’s programme in Creative Music Technology, were the first to compose for the setup, each of them making original compositions in abisonics audio. We were also so lucky as to have a version of Natasha Barrett’s composition Hidden Values decoded especially for the setup, which was also actively used in the course.

The coordinates for the loudspeaker setup can be downloaded here.