Spatial Audio with the SoundScape Renderer

The SoundScape Renderer (SSR) is a versatile tool for realtime spatial audio reproduction, implementing a variety of headphone- and loudspeaker-based methods. Among others this includes Wave Field Synthesis, Higher Order Ambisonics and dynamic binaural synthesis. The SSR is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License. It uses the JACK audio framework and is currently available for Linux and Mac OS X. Interaction with the program is possible using the built-in graphical user interface and via a network interface. For headphone reproduction native support for a number of head trackers is included. Sound sources including their position and other information are represented in a so-called spatial audio scene. Scenes can be loaded from and saved to XML files. The scene descrip-tion is independent from the rendering method. For instance, a spatial audio scene can be authored in a studio with headphones, using the binaural renderer. Later on, the scene can be performed in a different venue using loudspeakers, using Wave Field Synthesis. Recently, the signal processing core was rewritten for multi-threaded processing and in-dependence of the audio backend. Since then, all rendering modules of the SSR are also available as a software library which can be used to create stand-alone programs as well as plugins for existing audio software. Currently, all rendering modules are available as Externals for Puredata and as MEX-files for Octave/Matlab. 1