Spatial Manipulation of Sound using Multiple Sources

다수의 음원을 사용한 공간의 소리 제어 방법론

Spatial control of sound is essential to deliver better sound to the listener's position in space. As it can be experienced in many listening environments, the quality of sound can not be manifested over every position in a hall. This motivates us to control sound in a region we select. The primary focus of the developed method has to do with the brightness and contrast of acoustic image in space. In particular, the acoustic brightness control seeks a way to increase loudness of sound over a chosen area, and the contrast control aims to enhance loudness difference between two neighboring regions. This enables us to make two different kinds of zone - the zone of quiet and the zone of loud sound - at the same time. The other perspective of this study is on the direction of sound. It is shown that we can control the direction of perceived sound source by focusing acoustic energy in wavenumber domain. To begin with, the proposed approaches are formulated for pure-tone case. Then the control methods are extended to a more general case, where the excitation signal has broadband spectrum. In order to control the broadband signal in time domain, an inverse filter design problem is defined and solved in frequency domain. Numerical and experimental results obtained in various conditions certainly validate that the acoustic brightness, acoustic contrast, direction of wave front can be manipulated for some finite region in space and time.