StiffNeck: The Electroacoustic Music Performance Venue in a Box

StiffNeck is a tool for the auralisation of electroacoustic music performance venues based on measured room impulse responses. It has been developed to support in situ composition, a particular approach towards creating sitespecific electroacoustic music works. This compositional practice tries to take maximum advantage of the particularities of irregular loudspeaker configurations and their interaction with the acoustics of the room. StiffNeck can also be used to rehearse acousmatic performances, to test sound rendering with standard spatialisation techniques using regular loudspeaker configurations or to produce artificial sonic spaces in the context of studio work. StiffNeck comes with a large set of room impulse responses covering various loudspeaker configurations measured with an extensive array of microphones in KUG’s György Ligeti Hall in Graz. In addition to the convolution based auralisation, StiffNeck provides geometric representations of the loudspeakers, measurement positions, and the hall which can be used for purposes of visualisation but also for performing geometric calculations informing sound synthesis and projection. StiffNeck has been used to produce a variety of in situ compositions and has been evaluated informally at several occasions in various ways. The open source tool is available as standalone application and as a SuperCollider Quark.