Franz Zotter, University of Music and Performing Arts, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz, Austria
This video of a keynote lecture presented at the Virtual Vienna convention in June 2020 features Frank Zotter, long-time AES member and Ambisonics expert. Franz authored the book Ambisonics (Springer, 2019) together with his colleague Matthias Frank. He is DEGA's current TC Virtual Acoustics chair and was awarded DEGA's Lothar Cremer medal (2012). He likes to work with all kinds of spherical arrays (compact, surrounding, microphone, loudspeaker), to develop Ambisonic signal processing algorithms with his colleagues, and he has been organizing Europe's Student 3D Audio Production Competitions together with M. Frank.
Ambisonics sounds and works better as 3D audio technology than ever before. There are microphone arrays available for higher-order recording, excellent Ambisonic decoders for loudspeakers, and excellence has been achieved by new headphone decoders. Additionally, in the last decade, we have gathered a profound perceptual understanding of Ambisonics. In addition to commercial tools and plugins, many free tools developed at universities became available in recent years. Currently, we experience Ambisonic technology that is highly versatile and can easily live up to the expectations that its inventors had been dreaming of several decades ago.
