Generating Personal Sound Zones using Directional Loudspeakers

Personal sound generated in multi-zone environment provide users a private listening experience in a shared environment. The performance of multi-zone environment depends on the ability of the loudspeakers to accurately reproduce the desired sounds in the region of interest and simultaneously maintain high acoustic contrast between the bright zones and the dark zones, respectively. In this paper, a multi-zone sound reproduction framework is developed using a set of directional loudspeakers. Since, directional loudspeaker exhibits a radiation pattern that emits sound in specific direction, a set of directional loudspeakers has advantage to reproduce sound field effectively when compared with the set of isotropic loudspeakers. An improvement in the performance of acoustic contrast and accuracy of reproduction in bright zones is observed with directional loudspeakers. Additionally, with the use of the directional loudspeakers, the array effort and number of loudspeakers with high power consumption is reduced significantly. The proposed method is formulated as a pressure matching approach and is compared with the conventional isotropic loudspeaker. The multi-zone problem is tested for various target directions in a simulated environment.