Development and evaluation of a digital MEMS microphone array for spatial audio

We present the design of a digital microphone array comprised of MEMS microphones and evaluate its potential for spatial audio capturing and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation which is an essential part of encoding the soundscape. The device is a cheaper and more compact alternative to analog microphone arrays which require external - and usually expensive - analog-to-digital converters and sound cards. However, the performance of such digital arrays for DOA estimation and spatial audio acquisition has not been investigated. In this work, the efficiency of the digital array for spatial audio is evaluated and compared to a typical analog microphone array of the same geometry. Our results indicate that our digital array achieves the same performance as its analog counterpart, thus offering a cheaper and easily deployable device, suitable for spatial audio applications.