Wavefield analysis over large areas using distributed higher order microphones

Successful recording of large spatial soundfields is a prevailing challenge in acoustic signal processing due to the enormous numbers of microphones required. This paper presents the design and analysis of an array of higher order microphones that uses 2D wavefield translation to provide a mode matching solution to the height invariant recording problem. It is shown that the use of Mth order microphones significantly reduces the number of microphone units by a factor of 1/(2M+1) at the expense of increased complexity at each microphone unit. Robustness of the proposed array is also analyzed based on the condition number of the translation matrix while discussing array configurations that result in low condition numbers. The white-noise gain (WNG) of the array is then derived to verify that improved WNG can be achieved when the translation matrix is well conditioned. Furthermore, the array’s performance is studied for interior soundfield recording as well as exterior soundfield recording using appropriate simulation examples.