Intensity Based Spatial Soundfield Reproduction Using an Irregular Loudspeaker Array

Sound intensity is an acoustic quantity closely linked with human perception of sound location, and it can be controlled to create a high level of realism to humans in soundfield reproduction systems. In this article, we present an intensity matching technique to optimally reproduce sound intensity over a continuous spatial region using an irregular loudspeaker array. This avoids several known limitations in the previous works on intensity based soundfield reproduction, such as a single sweet spot for the listener and a regular loudspeaker geometry that is difficult to implement in real-world applications. In contrast to the previous works, the new technique uses a cost function we built to optimize sound intensity over space by exploiting spatial sound intensity distributions. The spatial sound intensity distribution is represented by spherical harmonic coefficients of sound pressure, which are widely used to describe a spatial soundfield. Compared to the conventional spatial soundfield reproduction method of pressure matching in the spherical harmonic domain and the HOA decoding method optimizing sound intensity at a single position, we show that the intensity matching technique has better overall performance with two different irregular loudspeaker layouts through simulations. The impact of microphone noise on reproduction performance is also assessed. Finally, we carry out perceptual localization experiments to validate the proposed method.