Abstract
The motivation behind this book lies in the rapidly growing interest in spherical microphone arrays over the last decade. Important applications for these arrays include human-human and human-machine speech communication systems and spatial sound recording. While human-human speech communication systems have a long history, speech also plays an ever-growing part in human-machine communication. This trend has been fuelled by advances in speech recognition technology, as well as the explosion in available computing power, particularly on mobile devices. With the widespread availability of 3D sound cinema systems and virtual reality gear with 3D binaural sound reproduction, the need to capture spatial sound is rapidly growing. Spherical microphone arrays are particularly suitable for capturing all three dimensions of the sound field, including both ambient sounds and sounds from particular directions. In this chapter, we introduce the topic of acoustic signal processing using microphone arrays, and then explore spherical microphone arrays in more detail. We provide an outline of the structure of the book, and discuss the relationships between each of the subsequent chapters.
Portions of this chapter were first published in [25], and are reproduced here with the author’s permission.
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Jarrett, D.P., Habets, E.A.P., Naylor, P.A. (2017). Introduction. In: Theory and Applications of Spherical Microphone Array Processing. Springer Topics in Signal Processing, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42211-4_1
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