Analytical Methods of Sound Field Synthesis: Theory and Applications

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 2:43

In sound field synthesis, an ensemble of elementary sound sources is driven such that a sound field with specific desired physical properties evolves over an extended region. Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and Near-field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics (NFC-HOA) constitute the two best-known approaches that address human listeners. The talk will give an overview of a general theoretical framework for the problem of sound field synthesis. The framework is based on fundamental integral equations and allows for indentifying WFS and NFC-HOA as particular solutions to the underlying problem. The presented framework assumes continuous distributions of elementary sound sources, which can not be implemented in practice. Rather, discrete distributions of a finite number of loudspeakers have to be employed. The second part of the talk presents a detailed analysis of the consequences of this spatial discretization on the synthesized sound fields. An interpretation of the properties of the latter with respect to human auditory perception is included. The talk concludes with an illustration of applications of sound field synthesis such as the synthesis of the sound field of moving sources, focused sources, and sources with complex radiation properties.