Robustness of spherical and cylindrical microphone arrays in harmonic beamforming applications

摘要

Microphone arrays are commonly used to record spatial sound information. Several techniques, collectively known as harmonic beamforming, can be used to pick up sounds arriving from specific directions. This serves as a starting point for spatial analysis and encoding methods, such as high-order Ambisonics. This research compares the effects that microphone positioning and calibration errors have in the performance of harmonic beamformers using spherical and cylindrical microphone arrays. The results show a comparable performance for both geometries, with cylindrical arrays being slightly more robust to imprecise microphone positioning and calibration.