Effects of Additive Noise in Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Signals

Journal article, 2021

Additive noise produced by the recording hardware will contribute to streamed signals from spherical microphone arrays under practical conditions. For the application of binaural reproduction and under the assumption that the noise is uncorrelated between the array channels, the spectral properties and the overall level of the rendered noise in the ear signals have been shown to be strongly influenced by the configuration of the array as well as of the processing pipeline. In a previous investigation, we determined the audibility thresholds for changes in the rendered noise due to listener head rotations as a function of the differences in noise level of individual array channels. In this article, we calibrate the instrumental metric of Composite Loudness Level to the perceptual data and predict audibility of changes in the additive noise due to head rotations for a broad set of array configurations and distributions of the noise levels across array channels. We demonstrate that some types of microphone layouts can produce audible variations even if the noise level is equal in all channels. This is particularly the case for sampling grids that exhibit negative quadrature weights such as the Lebedev and Fliege-Maier grids for some spherical harmonic orders. The analysis of configurations with unevenly distributed noise contributions show that the influence of the noise from individual array channels is determined by the proximity of their virtual location to the relative trajectory of the ears.