Sound Field Reproduction With Weighted Mode Matching and Infinite-Dimensional Harmonic Analysis: An Experimental Evaluation

Sound field reproduction methods based on numerical optimization, which aim to minimize the error between synthesized and desired sound fields, are useful in many practical scenarios because of their flexibility in the array geometry of loudspeakers. However, the reproduction performance of these methods in a practical environment has not been sufficiently investigated. We evaluate weighted mode matching, which is a sound field reproduction method based on the spherical wavefunction expansion of the sound field, in comparison with conventional pressure matching. We also introduce a method of infinite-dimensional harmonic analysis for estimating the expansion coefficients of the sound field from microphone measurements. Experimental results indicated that weighted mode matching using the expansion coefficients of the transfer functions estimated by the infinite-dimensional harmonic analysis outperforms conventional pressure matching, especially when the number of microphones is small.