Spatial soundfield recording over a large area using distributed higher order microphones

Recording and reproduction of spatial sound fields over a large area is an unresolved problem in acoustic signal processing. This is due to the the inherent restriction in recording higher order harmonic components using practically realizable microphone arrays. As the frequency increases and as the region of interest becomes large the number of microphones needed in effective recording increases beyond practicality. In this paper, we show how to use higher order microphones, distributed in a large area, to record and accurately reconstruct 2D spatial sound fields. We use sound field coefficient translation between origins to combine distributed field recording to a single sound field over the entire region. We use simulation examples in (i) interior and (ii) exterior fields to corroborate our design.