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A Simple and Efficient Method for Real-Time Computation and Transformation of Spherical Harmonic-Based Sound Fields

The potential for higher order Ambisonics to be applied to audio applications such as virtual reality, live music, and computer games relies entirely on the real-time performance characteristics of the system, as the computational overhead determines factors of latency and, consequently, user experience. Spherical harmonic functions are used to describe the directional information in an Ambisonic sound field, and as the order of the system is increased, so too is the computational expense, due to the added number of spherical harmonic functions to be calculated. The present paper describes a method for simplified implementation and efficient computation of the spherical harmonic functions and applies the technique to the transformation of encoded sound fields. Comparisons between the new method and typical direct calculation methods are presented.

Authors: Davis, Robert E.; Clark, D. Fraser
Affiliation: University of the West of Scotland, Paisley, Scotland, UK
AES Convention:133 (October 2012) Paper Number:8756 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Spatial Audio

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