Microphone and Loudspeaker Array Signal Processing to Build a "Radiation Keyboard" for Authentic Samplers

To date electric pianos and samplers tend to concentrate on authenticity in terms of temporal and spectral aspects of sound. They barely recreate the original sound radiation characteristics, contribute to the perception of width and depth, vividness and voice separation, especially for instrumentalists, who are located in the near field. This paper describes an operational procedure to measure, store, and synthesize the complete sound of a harpsichord, including its spatial sound radiation characteristics. First, actuators excite the instrument at the intersection point of each string with the bridge with an exponential sine-sweep. Then, the radiated sound field is recorded in the near and the far field with microphone arrays. The pressure distribution in the near field is propagated back to the soundboard of the instrument, using Minimum Energy Method. The vibration of each single string is captured with lightweight contact microphones. The soundboard is then replaced by an array of 128 loudspeakers. The loudspeaker signal is a convolution of the back-propagated sweep recording with the string recording to perform a wave field synthesis. Above the spatial Nyquist frequency, the Radiation Method is applied to perform a sound field synthesis which is valid for the listening region of the instrumentalist. The result is an electric harpsichord, that approximates the sound of a real harpsichord precisely in time, frequency, and space domain. Applications for such a radiation keyboard are music performance, instrument and synthesizer building and interactive psychoacoustic research.

3D Display System Based on Spherical Wave Field Synthesis

We present a novel concept and first experimental results of a new type of 3D display, which is based on the synthesis of spherical waves. The setup comprises a lens array (LA) with apertures in the millimeter range and a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel. Each pixel of the LCD creates a spherical wave cutout that propagates towards the observer. During the displaying process, the curvature of the spherical waves is dynamically changed by either changing the distance between LA and LCD or by adapting the focal lengths of the lenses. Since the system, similar to holography, seeks to approximate the wavefront of a natural scene, it provides true depth information to the observer and therefore avoids any vergence–accommodation conflict (VAC).

Acoustical Behaviour of Buckling Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

Dielectric elastomers (DE) are regarded as a potential alternative to conventional actuator technologies. They feature low weight, high strains and low material costs. Their scope of application ranges from sensors, energy generators, smart textiles to biomimetic robots and much more. A few concepts of loudspeakers using DE have been demonstrated by the research community. One of the disadvantages of previously concepts was the need for mechanical bias (e.g. by air pressure). This work proposes a new concept of loudspeaker, which does not need prestretch or other means of mechanical bias. Buckling dielectric elastomer transducers (BDET) use the area expansion of actuated DE to buckle up. This mechanism is used to construct a millimeter-scale loudspeaker with good frequency response in the upper frequency range. The concept is implemented using automatically fabricated multi-layer membranes. The multilayer structure allows to generate more force and has higher flexural rigidity than a single-layer setup. Samples with different amount of layers are fabricated and an analytical model is derived. Measurements of the static deflection, the frequency response and the total harmonic distortion validate the model. The small scale of the speaker allows it to be installed in large arrays and thus might offer a hardware platform for high-resolution beam forming or wave field synthesis.