Spherical Microphone Array Processing and Spatial Audio

Spherical Microphone array systems are very powerful in providing a three dimensional acoustic cue of an sonic scene. Perhaps spherical microphone array systems come as the foremost solution to that end. Now there are a variety of application where such array systems and underlying techniques prove out to be very useful and necessary. Spatial audio is one such case. In spatial audio three dimensional recreation of sound is attempted utilizing an array of loudspeaker system. The mathematical treatment of spherical microphone array systems and underlying signal processing techniques are explained. Moreover an attempt is made to explain various inherent errors which occur in spherical array processing and simulations are done to analyse the effect of these errors on real measurements. As an application area, spherical microphones array systems for spatial audio is studied and further analysed with auralization of the simulated impulse responses measured on a rigid sphere array system. Wave field synthesis is used on the loudspeaker side and hence the current study also gives a look on how circular WFS system handles 3-dimensional channels measured by spherical array system.