Plane-wave decomposition and ambisonics output from spherical and nonspherical microphone arrays

Abstract

Any acoustic sensor embedded in a baffle disturbs the spatial acoustic field to a certain extent, and the recorded field is different from a field that would have existed if the baffle were absent. Recovery of the original (incident) field is a fundamental task in spatial audio. For some sensor baffle geometries, such as the sphere, the disturbance of the field by the sensor can be characterized analytically and its influence can be undone to recover the incident field. However, for arbitrary shaped baffles, numerical methods have to be employed. In the current work, the baffle influence on the field is characterized using boundary element methods, and a framework to recover the incident field from measurements from sensors embedded on the baffle in the plane-wave function basis is developed. Field recovery also allows generation of high-order ambisonics representations of the spatial audio scene. Experimental results using both complex and spherical scatterers will be presented.