3D Exterior Soundfield Reproduction Using a Planar Loudspeaker Array

In this paper, we propose a planar array of dipole (or first-order) loudspeakers to reproduce a full three dimensional (3D) exterior soundfield over a desired spatial region. The proposed method is inspired by the spherical harmonics based solution for 3D soundfield reproduction. When decomposed in terms of spherical harmonics, we separate the corresponding soundfield coefficients into two sets (even and odd) and exploit the inherent properties of Legendre polynomials to control each set using a planar array of dipole (or first-order) speakers. We provide simulation examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.