Towards Maximizing a Perceptual Sweet Spot
This addresses the challenge of improving spatial audio quality for listeners in applications like virtual reality or home theater systems, representing a domain-specific incremental advancement.
The paper tackles the problem of maximizing the perceptual sweet spot for spatial audio reproduction using loudspeaker arrays, and the result shows that their method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization and coloration properties in proof-of-concept experiments.
The sweet spot can be interpreted as the region where acoustic sources create a spatial auditory illusion. We study the problem of maximizing this sweet spot when reproducing a desired sound wave using an array of loudspeakers. To achieve this, we introduce a theoretical framework for spatial sound perception that can be used to define a sweet spot, and we develop a method that aims to generate a sound wave that directly maximizes the sweet spot defined by a model within this framework. Our method aims to incorporate perceptual principles from the onset and is flexible: while it imposes little to no constraints on the regions of interest, the arrangement of loudspeakers or their radiation pattern, it allows for audio perception models that include state-of-the-art monaural perceptual models. Proof-of-concept experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods when comparing them in terms of their localization and coloration properties.