Transaural Beamforming Methods for Controllable Focused Sound Reproduction

Diploma thesis

In literatuer several proposals can be found on how to synthesise or resynthesise soundfields. In general, there are two main strategies. Global approaches like Wave Field Synthesis or Ambisonics have been derived over physical equivalents and aim to reproduce a sound field within a whole area. Local approaches on the other hand are designed to reproduce the sound field at the position of a user only.

The inherent goal of this work is to elaborate possible improvements for air traffic control communication conditions. In order to free air traffic controlers from the demanding usage of headphones, a loudspeaker array based application is introduced. This application uses near field beamforming to concentrate the sound pressure at the position of the user, or his/her ears respectively. Further improvements, like binaurally encoded signals and crosstalk canellation, as well as alternative sound focussing techniques are discussed and/or implemented.