Wave field synthesis of a sound field described by spherical harmonics expansion coefficients

Near-field compensated higher order Ambisonics (NFC-HOA) and wave field synthesis (WFS) constitute the two best-known analytic sound field synthesis methods. While WFS is typically used for the synthesis of virtual sound scenes, NFC-HOA is typically employed in order to synthesize sound fields that have been captured with appropriate microphone arrays. Such recorded sound fields are essentially represented by the coefficients of the underlying surface spherical harmonics expansion. A sound field described by such coefficients cannot be straightforwardly synthesized in WFS. This is a consequence of the fact that, unlike in NFC-HOA, it is critical in WFS to carefully select those loudspeakers that contribute to the synthesis of a given sound source in a sound field under consideration. In order to enable such a secondary source selection, it is proposed to employ the well-known concept of decomposing the sound field under consideration into a continuum of plane waves, for which the secondary source selection is straightforward. The plane wave representation is projected onto the horizontal plane and a closed form expression of the secondary source driving signals for horizontal WFS systems of arbitrary convex shape is derived. (C) 2012 Acoustical Society of America. [DOI: 10.1121/1.3682036]