Spherical Microphone Array Based Immersive Audio Scene Rendering

Abstract

In many applications such as entertainment, education, military training, remote telepresence, surveillance, etc. it is necessary to capture an acoustic field and present it to listeners with a goal of creating the same acoustic perception for them as if they were actually present at the scene. Currently, there is much interest in the use of spherical microphone arrays for acoustic scene capture and reproduction. We describe a 32-microphone spherical array based system implemented for spatial audio capture and reproduction. Our array embeds hardware that is traditionally external, such as preamplifiers, filters, digital-to-analog converters, and USB adaptor, resulting in a portable lightweight solution and requiring no hardware on the PC side whatsoever other than a high-speed USB port. We provide capability analysis of the array and describe software suite developed for the application.