Towards Perceptually Optimized Sound Zones: A Proof-of-concept Study

The creation of sound zones has been an active research topic for approximately two decades. Many sound zone control methods have been proposed, and the best approaches result in a target to interferer ratio (TIR) of about 15 dB in a practical set-up. Unfortunately, this is far from a TIR of about 25 dB which is currently believed necessary to make sound zones commercially viable. However, state-of-the-art sound zone control methods take neither the input signal characteristics nor human auditory perception into account. In this paper, we show how a recently proposed sound zone control framework called VAST can be extended into perceptual VAST (P-VAST) which takes input signal characteristics and human auditory perception into account. We also make a proof-of-concept simulation and an AB preference test which both show that P-VAST outperforms traditional sound zone control methods in terms of perceptually meaningful metrics such as STOI and PESQ in a fairly simple set-up.