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Alexander Refsum Jensenius edited this page Aug 16, 2026 · 15 revisions

ambiscape is a toolbox for analysing soundscapes—sonic ambiences—from any recording: mono, stereo, binaural, or first-order ambisonic. The README covers installation and a first session; the documentation site defines every method and command. This wiki holds the material around the tool: how to record, worked examples, and the reasoning and research behind the design.

Where to find what

Looking for… Go to
Install and a one-page overview README
User guide, command overview, API reference Documentation site
How to record in the field Field Recording Protocol
Step-by-step task walkthroughs Recipes
Reading a whole building with several recorders Multi Recorder Networks
Why the toolbox works the way it does, and open directions Design Decisions
A worked field validation (bells, rhythm) Case Study Haarlem Damiaatjes
A worked long-form case study (machine states, executable report) Case Study Haarlem Loft
The research programme and corpora around the tool Research Context
Combining audio and video analysis (MGT, 360 cameras, device sync) Working with MGT-python

The ecosystem in one paragraph

ambiscape is developed in the AMBIENT project at fourMs / RITMO (University of Oslo), as the streaming companion to ambiviz. ambiviz renders rich spatial visuals (AEM, anglegram, directogram) from audio it can load whole; ambiscape summarises sessions of hours to nights and selects the excerpts worth rendering. ambiviz needs first-order AmbiX B-format; ambiscape analyses that richest case but also mono, stereo, and binaural recordings, using whatever spatial information each carries.

The other fourMs toolboxes

Separate packages with separate release cycles. Each runs on its own, and ambiscape imports none of them. Where a measure appears in more than one it has a single owner, so the same measure computed in two of them agrees; circular statistics belong to micromotion.

Where they hand audio to one another they do it as files, named with a leading YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS wall-clock stamp so the receiving toolbox can place the material on a real clock. io.export_segment writes that stamp, and open_session reads it.

Toolbox What it is for Docs
Musical Gestures Toolbox (musicalgestures) video and audio: motiongrams, videograms, motion analysis from ordinary video wiki
musiscape music collections and long music recordings: comparing many tracks, and finding the songs inside a concert wiki
micromotion human micromotion: quantity of motion from markers, accelerometers, belts and force plates wiki

Citing ambiscape

The package is archived on Zenodo. Cite the CONCEPT DOI, which always resolves to the newest version: 10.5281/zenodo.21948997.

Where the exact behaviour matters, add the version you ran; every release has its own DOI, listed on the Zenodo record. CITATION.cff in the repository carries the same information in machine-readable form.

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