Radiated Sound Field Reproduction for Surrounding Loudspeaker Array Based on Higher-order Ambisonics

This paper proposes a radiated sound field reproduction method for a surrounding loudspeaker array. The conventional method controls the direction of the virtual sound image by a vector base amplitude panning (VBAP). The real sound source like human speech and musical instruments has a directivity pattern and should be considered to reproduce the sound field. However, the VBAP-based method cannot represent the directivity pattern because VBAP only controls the amplitude of an audio signal. In this paper, we propose the radiated sound field reproduction method for a surrounding loudspeaker array based on higher-order ambisonics (HOA). Based on HOA, the proposed method calculates the driving function of the virtual sound source by using the directivity pattern of the virtual sound source. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves to represent the radiation sound with a normalized reproduction error of −20 dB in the target region.