Spatial sound pick-up with a low number of microphones

Abstract

For several decades spatial audio has been only used by movies, music composers and researchers in laboratories. Because of their complexity, people have always been away from 3D audio techniques. Dedicated devices such as microphone and loudspeaker arrays are expensive and cannot be used without some expertise of audio capturing and reproduction. Nowadays the main barrier preventing a consumer solution from capturing spatial audio is the big number of transducers needed to get an accurate 3D sound image. In order to break down this barrier we propose a new 3D audio recording set-up which is composed of a three-microphone array able to get the full 3D audio information. A 2D version, consisting of a two-microphone array, is also available. The sound localization is based on the transducer directivities and additional information to solve the angular ambiguity. This paper will describe firstly the microphone set-up and its associated algorithm. Secondly the performances of sound localization will be assessed. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.