Breaking down the cocktail party: Capturing and isolating sources in a soundscape

Spatial scene capture and reproduction requires extracting directional information from captured signals. Our previous work focused on directional coding of a sound scene using a single microphone array. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of using multiple microphone arrays, and extend our previous method by allowing arrays to cooperate during spatial feature extraction. We can thus render the sound scene using both direction and distance information and selectively reproduce specific “spots” of the captured sound scene.