Time Domain Spherical Harmonic Processing with Open Spherical Microphones Recording

Spherical harmonic analysis has been a widely used approach for spatial audio processing in recent years. Among all applications that benefit from spatial processing, spatial Active Noise Control (ANC) remains unique with its requirement for open spherical microphone arrays to record the residual sound field throughout the continuous region. Ideally, a low delay spherical harmonic recording algorithm for open spherical microphone arrays is desired for real-time spatial ANC systems. Currently, frequency domain algorithms for spherical harmonic decomposition of microphone array recordings are applied in a spatial ANC system. However, a Short Time Fourier Transform is required, which introduces undesirable system delay for ANC systems. In this paper, we develop a time domain spherical harmonic decomposition algorithm for the application of spatial audio recording mainly with benefit to ANC with an open spherical microphone array. Microphone signals are processed by a series of pre-designed finite impulse response (FIR) filters to obtain a set of time domain spherical harmonic coefficients. The time domain coefficients contain the continuous spatial information of the residual sound field. We corroborate the time domain algorithm with a numerical simulation of a fourth order system, and show the proposed method to have lower delay than existing approaches.

Denoising Directional Room Impulse Responses with Spatially Anisotropic Late Reverberation Tails

Directional room impulse responses (DRIR) measured with spherical microphone arrays (SMA) enable the reproduction of room reverberation effects on three-dimensional surround-sound systems (e.g., Higher-Order Ambisonics) through multichannel convolution. However, such measurements inevitably contain a nondecaying noise floor that may produce an audible “infinite reverberation effect” upon convolution. If the late reverberation tail can be considered a diffuse field before reaching the noise floor, the latter may be removed and replaced with an extension of the exponentially-decaying tail synthesized as a zero-mean Gaussian noise. This has previously been shown to preserve the diffuse-field properties of the late reverberation tail when performed in the spherical harmonic domain (SHD). In this paper, we show that in the case of highly anisotropic yet incoherent late fields, the spatial symmetry of the spherical harmonics is not conducive to preserving the energy distribution of the reverberation tail. To remedy this, we propose denoising in an optimized spatial domain obtained by plane-wave decomposition (PWD), and demonstrate that this method equally preserves the incoherence of the late reverberation field.