Perceptually Accurate Reproduction of Recorded Sound Fields in a Reverberant Room Using Spatially Distributed Loudspeakers

In sound reproduction, it can be desirable to reproduce a recording made, e.g., in a concert hall, in a playback room, such that the listener has a reasonable accurate impression of the original sound source, including the room acoustics of the recording room. A perceptually motivated approach is developed which aims to accurately reproduce the perceptual spatial and monaural cues of the direct and reverberant sound fields of the recording room for playback in a reverberant room. For this approach, the direct sound, recorded close to the sound source, is optimized and processed with an auditory motivated gammatone filterbank such that spectral cues (the coloration) are faithfully reproduced in the playback room. In addition, the reverberant sound is recorded at two distant positions from the sound source in the recording room. These signals are rendered over two dipole loudspeakers. Due to the arrangement of the dipoles, the listener receives no direct sound field from the dipoles and, thus, only the diffuse field in the playback room is excited. In this way the reverberant field can be adjusted independent of the direct sound. Therefore, the spectral cues and the interaural cross correlation of the reverberant sound field can be optimized separately to make sure they match the cues which were present in the recording room.