Using binaural and spherical microphone arrays to assess the quality of synthetic spatial sound fields

Recently, we completed the Collaborative-Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment Laboratory (CRAIVE-Lab) with a usable floor area of 12 × 10 m² at Rensselaer. The CRAIVE-Lab project addresses the need for a specialized virtual-reality (VR) system for the study and enabling of communication-driven tasks with groups of users immersed in a high-fidelity multi-modal environment located in the same physical space. For the acoustic domain, a 134-loudspeaker-channel system has been installed for Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) with the support of Higher-Order-Ambisonic (HoA) sound projection to render inhomogeneous acoustic fields. An integrated 16-channel spherical microphone array makes the CRAIVE-Lab an ideal test bed to study different spatial rendering techniques such as Wave-Field Synthesis, Higher-Order Ambisonics and Virtual Microphone Control (ViMiC). In this talk, sound-field measurements taken with a traditional binaural manikin will be compared to spherical microphone recordings to assess the quality of the different rendering techniques for large-scale labs. A focus will hereby be set on assessing the sweet spot area for different rendering techniques. [Work supported by NSF 1229391, NSF 1631674, and the Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory (CISL).]