“I Feel Like”
Written, recorded and mixed in three dimensions rather than mixed down into them.
About forty sources are encoded individually into a second-order ambisonic field and positioned by azimuth and elevation rather than panned left to right. The same master is then decoded three ways: to the 3D speaker layout in IRCAM’s Studio D, binaurally to headphones, and down to stereo. Production in Ableton, spatialization in Reaper with the IEM Plug-in Suite.
Headphones recommended. Plays in the bar at the bottom.
Room encoding, directivity shaping and a feedback-delay-network reverb all run inside the ambisonic domain on their own buses rather than on a stereo bus, so reverberation and source placement stay in the same coordinate system as everything else. One source was recorded on a tetrahedral microphone and converted from A-format to B-format before it went in.
All source material was recorded for the piece: percussion and resonant metal and glass captured at the Ateliers Baschet on omnidirectional capsules, so the resonant tail of the Cristal Baschet and the behaviour of the room came with it, plus field recordings from the Bois de Vincennes that run raw underneath the whole track and also feed two granular layers.
Spatial motion carries the structure here. The granular layers orbit the listener rather than panning across a stereo field, and they swell into the break because the argument has gone somewhere the beat cannot follow. At the end the glitch layer takes over the whole field.
The paper
The full account of the piece — the sources, the spatial design section by section, and what the ambisonic workflow changed about how I compose.
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Reaper · Ableton Live · IEM Plug-in Suite · Sennheiser AMBEO · Zoom H6 omni pair