Measurement of 3D Room Impulse Responses with a Spherical Microphone Array

Directional room impulse responses (DRIRs) are composed of the sound contributions reaching a given location in the room from a well-defined direction in space. DRIRs can be useful in many applications, such as the evaluation of spatial room acoustics parameters, the detection of unwanted specular reflections or the 3D auralization of acoustic spaces. A spherical array containing 16 microphones has been realized to measure DRIRs. The logarithmic sinesweep technique is first applied to measure 16 impulse responses, one for each microphone. A spherical harmonics (SH) decomposition of the sound field is then obtained. Spatial aliasing, placement errors and the ‘white noise gain’ (WNG) have been analysed to define the useful bandwith of this measure, i.e. [250Hz – 4kHz]. The coefficients of the SH decomposition are then processed by some beamforming methods, in order to compute the DRIR in any direction around the spherical array. Time and 3D space representations can be generated. The results obtained in some rooms are illustrated in this paper: it is shown that the combination of the ‘delay-and-sum’ and ‘minimum-variance distorsionless response’ beamforming methods is particularly well suited for the analysis of DRIRs.