Spatial sound intensity vectors in spherical harmonic domain

Abstract

Sound intensity is a fundamental quantity describing acoustic wave fields and it contains both energy and directivity information. It is used in a variety of applications such as source localization, reproduction, and power measurement. Until now, intensity is defined at a point in space, however given sound propagates over space, knowing its spatial distribution could be more powerful. This paper formulates spatial sound intensity vectors in spherical harmonic domain such that the vectors contain energy and directivity information over continuous spatial regions. These representations are derived with finite sets of closed form coefficients enabling ease of implementation.