astral-plane's Introduction

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!)

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

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.

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.