Overview

The HARMAN KARDON Ambient Sound Engine is an immersive spatial audio system designed for connected multi-channel HARMAN KARDON speaker setups in automotive and home environments. It uses Vector Base Amplitude Panning (VBAP) to render layered ambient soundscapes with precise three-dimensional positioning across all available speaker channels.

VBAP Spatial Rendering

VBAP distributes each audio element's gain across adjacent speaker pairs based on source azimuth and spread parameters. This allows a single mono or stereo audio clip to be perceived as coming from any direction in the horizontal plane, which produces a 360° surround field as elements move dynamically at runtime.

Scene Design

Each sound scene is built from the following spatial audio elements:

Type	Description
Bed	Stereo background layer rendered as a full-sphere ambient field
Dipole	Directional and moving stereo source with configurable azimuth and rotation speed.
Decorator	Point-source events are spatially placed and animated via VBAP panning, spreading, and rotation.

Runtime Control

A web controller communicates with the engine over the local network, exposing per-element sliders for volume, speed, and positioning.

Element behavior can be updated live via scripted expressions:

e.g., set_vol(-28 + 20*x), set_spd(9 + 30*x).