Does anyone have ideas of how to do sound (spatial audio) projection from an area … similar to an area light.

This can be done with multiple speakers (sound,object level), and then blend intensity levels between the speakers based on object levels, but what I want to do is to dynamically generate this sound from more of a circular pattern, so it would be better coming from a “shape”.

any ideas?

I don't really know but if you can stick to a fixed sampling of your shape (eg. X number of sound objects where X doesn't change), then you could just pre-create your objects and place them at your geometry point positions using the point() expression. Or are you asking more on the how to combine them properly side?

ah, well the speaker/sound is on the object level … how would I get that to copy and do many sound objects?

But yeah I'm trying to project sound from the surface of a cylinder … if it was a box I'd just do eight speakers/sound objects.

Where the creature legs touch the cylinder is where I want the sounds to come from. There will be many legs touching the cylinder at once so I don't think the best approach would be to animate a speaker or link hundreds of speakers to the legs of the creature crowd.

ah think I've got it worked out … so the key is to use the speakers only for the microphone recording / panning … not the volume.

The volume is controlled by a chop that goes based on distance of the thing generating the sound from the microphone (distance expression etc). So, for each channel generating a sound, the sound would first be lowered in volume based on a distance/math chop, and then sent to the approprate speaker(s), only 6 speakers total (up,down,left,right,front,back). There can be cones on the microphones but no distance falloff in the spatial audio (which would lower the volume.)