Colouration in Local Wave Field Synthesis

F Winter, H Wierstorf, C Hold, F Krüger, A Raake, S Spors, "Colouration in Local Wave Field Synthesis," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 26, p. 1913-1924 (2018). [ link ]

Bibtex

@article{Winter2018a,
    title   = {Colouration in Local Wave Field Synthesis},
    author  = {Winter, Fiete and Wierstorf, Hagen and Hold, Christoph and
               Krüger, Frank and Raake, Alexander and Spors, Sascha},
    journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing},
    volume  = {26},
    number  = {10},
    pages   = {1913-1924},
    year    = {2018},
    doi     = {10.1109/TASLP.2018.2842435}
}

Abstract

Sound Field Synthesis techniques including Wave Field Synthesis and Near-Field-Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics aim at a physically accurate reproduction of a desired sound field inside an extended listening area. This area is surrounded by loudspeakers individually driven by their respective driving signals. The latter have to be chosen such that the superposition of all emitted sound fields coincides with the desired one. Due to practical limitations, artefacts impair the synthesis accuracy resulting in a perceivable change in timbre. Recently, two approaches to so-called Local Wave Field Synthesis were published which enhance the reproduction accuracy in a limited region while allowing stronger artefacts outside. This work reports on two listening experiments comparing conventional techniques for Sound Field Synthesis with the mentioned approaches. Furthermore, the influence of different parametrisations for Local Wave Field Synthesis is investigated. The results show that the enhanced reproduction accuracy in Local Wave Field Synthesis leads to a reduction of perceived colouration, if a suitable parametrisation is chosen.