Spherical array beamforming for binaural sound reproduction

In recent years, the employment of microphone arrays has become popular for capturing speech signals of participants in telecommunication systems. In order to achieve improved realism and perceived speaker directions in telepresence applications it may be desired to preserve some of the spatial information of the recorded sound rather than producing a single channel output. As a consequence, spatial hearing mechanisms in the auditory system of a listener may be triggered, which may potentially improve the intelligibility. This work represents a binaural beamforming approach which aims to preserve some of the spatial characteristics of the captured signal, with regard to head related transfer function (HRTF) of the left and right ears. Spherical microphone array configuration is used for the capturing of sound fields. Beam patterns are displayed for the left and right ears, and compared with the beam pattern of a conventional maximum directivity beamformer.