Special Guests

University of Greenwich Centre for Sound and Image will be special guests providing a concert and workshop with the IKO Speaker.

IKO is the most compact speaker system for Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA) available in the world today.

It is unique in its relationships to sound materials and the compositional process. It brings the materiality of a site to life, and elicits powerful affect on listeners.

Highly relational in nature, it involves the sounds, the space, and the listeners in a way which no other system does.

The IKO emits highly directional sound beams in a full 360 degrees. These direct beams combine with reflected sound from the walls, ceiling and floor of a site, to create an exceptional spatial impression. In contrast to the usual ‘outside-in’ multichannel speaker systems, it is an ‘inside-out’ system. Dr Franz Zotter developed the first prototype of the icosahedral speaker in 2006 at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria. Originally it was intended to simulate the natural sound radiation of acoustic musical instruments.