Hyperspace II
The idea of distributing a limited number of audio channels (typically stereo) over a larger amount of loudspeakers is refered to as ”diffusion” of a sound source. It is commonly known in electro acoustic music where you more often play a fixed media. It can occaisionally occur with live performance or in combinations of the two.
Traditionally the mixing console with faders has been and still is the dominating way of doing this kind of loudspeaker control. Changing the level of the various loudspeaker can create an illusion of sound spreading or moving in space.
However ”playing” the music like this has some physical limitations decided by the number of faders to control and the fact that you can only use a maximum of eigth fingers at a time (the thumb is to short and forces the other fingers out of position due to the twist of the wrist needed to move the thumb. Try it and you will see...)
Thus, trying to control even eight faders at a time is somewhat demanding to do with some accuracy. Trying to deal with 32 faders or more is very hard and basically impossible if you want to make fast and yet well controlled changes of loudspeaker balances. This is why I created HyperSpace II.
Instead of using eight fingers to control the individual levels of eigth speakers you can use one. Instead of even trying to adjust the level of 32 faders using eigth fingers you can still use just one. This is based on the function of subgroups. Subgroups are well known to anyone working with bigger mixing consoles. The idea being that you can control and balance several input/output channels by using just one fader to change the overall volume of the group of input channels. This works well as long as you dont have to deal with too many input channels and too many output channels. Most DAWs will let you do just that. However most DAWs can not address more than 8 output channels per output bus. So, if you want one subgroup to go to lets say 32 output channels/loudspeakers you wold need the input to be sending to four subgroups per channel. And if you want each input configuration to set a fixed level relationship to the 32 outputs you would need 32 inputs for each setup of input/output relation. You see where this is going?
Not practical and deadly boring to even start thinking about actually doing it. Not to mention the size of the mixing console...
