Spatial perception of sound fields recorded by spherical microphone arrays with varying spatial resolution.

The area of sound field synthesis has significantly advanced in the past decade, facilitated by the development of high-quality sound-field capturing and re-synthesis systems. Spherical microphone arrays are among the most recently developed systems for sound field capturing, enabling processing and analysis of three-dimensional sound fields in the spherical harmonics domain. In spite of these developments, a clear relation between sound fields recorded by spherical microphone arrays and their perception with a re-synthesis system has not yet been established, although some relation to scalar measures of spatial perception was recently presented.

Interaural cross correlation in a sound field represented by spherical harmonics.

Spatial impression is an important acoustic quality of concert halls. An accepted objective measure for spatial impression is the interaural cross-correlation (IACC) coefficient. Recently, spherical microphone arrays have been studied for room acoustics analysis and music recordings.