Sound field decomposition using spherical microphone arrays

Spherical microphone arrays offer a number of attractive properties such as direction-independent acoustic behavior and ability to reconstruct the sound field in the vicinity of the array. Such ability is necessary in applications such as ambisonics and recreating auditory environment over headphones. We compare the performance of two scene reconstruction algorithms - one based on least-squares fitting the observed potentials and another based on computing the far-field signature function directly from the microphone measurements. A number of features important for the design and operation of spherical microphone arrays in real applications are revealed. Results indicate that it is possible to reconstruct the sound scene up to order p with p² microphones.