The Far-Field Equatorial Array for Binaural Rendering
Paper in proceeding, 2021

We present a method for obtaining a spherical harmonic representation of a sound field based on a microphone array along the equator of a rigid spherical scatterer. The two-dimensional plane wave de-composition of the incoming sound field is computed from the microphone signals. The influence of the scatterer is removed under the assumption of distant sound sources, and the result is converted to a spherical harmonic (SH) representation, which in turn can be rendered binaurally. The approach requires an order of magnitude fewer microphones compared to conventional spherical arrays that operate at the same SH order at the expense of not being able to accurately represent non-horizontally-propagating sound fields. Although the scattering removal is not perfect at high frequencies at low harmonic orders, numerical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.

binaural rendering

spherical harmonics

plane wave decomposition

Microphone array

HRTFs

Author

Jens Ahrens

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Applied Acoustics

Hannes Helmholz

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Applied Acoustics

David Lou Alon

Facebook Reality Labs

Sebastia V. Amengual Gari

Facebook Reality Labs

ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings

15206149 (ISSN)

Vol. 2021-June 421-425

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Toronto, Canada,

Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Data

Oculus Inc., 2018-05-01 -- 2019-04-30.

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

Signal Processing

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414368

Related datasets

Audio examples accompanying the paper "The Far-Field Equatorial Array for Binaural Rendering", IEEE ICASSP (2021) [dataset]

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4807499 URI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4807499

More information

Latest update

9/28/2021