Capture and Recreation of Higher-Order 3D Sound Fields via Reciprocity

We propose a unified and simple approach of capturing and recreating 3D sound fields by exploring the reciprocity principle that is satisfied between the two processes. Our approach makes the system easy to build, and practical. Using this approach, we can capture the 3D sound field by a spherical microphone array and recreate it using a spherical loudspeaker array, and ensure that the recreated sound field matches the recorded field up to a high order of spherical harmonics. A design example and simulation results are presented. For some regular or semi-regular microphone layouts, we design an efficient parallel implementation of the multi-directional spherical beamformer by using the rotational symmetries of the beampattern and of the spherical microphone array. This can be implemented in either software or hardware. A simple design example is presented to demonstrate the idea. It can be easily adapted for other regular or semi-regular layouts of microphones.