Sound Traffic Control: An Interactive 3-D Audio System for Live Musical Performance

Sound Traffic Control (STC) is a system for interactively controlled 3-D audio, displayed using a loudspeaker array. The intended application is live musical performance. Goals of the system include flexibility, ease of use, fault tolerance, audio quality, and synchronization with external media sources such as MIDI, audio feeds from musicians, and video. It uses a collection of both commercial and custom components. The development and design of the current system is described, embodying ideas developed during over a decade of experimentation, and is evaluated based on the experiences of users and developers.