Analytical Methods of Sound Field Synthesis: Theory and Applications

July 11, 2011
Jens Ahrens | University of Technology Berlin

In sound field synthesis, an ensemble of elementary sound sources is driven such that a sound field with specific desired physical properties evolves over an extended region. Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and Near-field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics (NFC-HOA) constitute the two best-known approaches that address human listeners. The talk will give an overview of a general theoretical framework for the problem of sound field synthesis. The framework is based on fundamental integral equations and allows for indentifying WFS and NFC-HOA as particular solutions to the underlying problem.
The presented framework assumes continuous distributions of elementary sound sources, which can not be implemented in practice. Rather, discrete distributions of a finite number of loudspeakers have to be employed. The second part of the talk presents a detailed analysis of the consequences of this spatial discretization on the synthesized sound fields. An interpretation of the properties of the latter with respect to human auditory perception is included.
The talk concludes with an illustration of applications of sound field synthesis such as the synthesis of the sound field of moving sources, focused sources, and sources with complex radiation properties.

Speaker Details

Jens Ahrens received a Master of Science with distinction in Electrical Engineering/Sound Engineering from Graz University of Technology and University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz in 2005. Since 2006 he has been a member of the research staff at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, which are jointly run by Deutsche Telekom and University of Technology Berlin. In 2010 he received the Doctoral Degree (Dr.-Ing.) with distinction from University of Technology Berlin. His main research interests include the physical fundamentals of sound field synthesis and perception of synthetic sound fields.