Exploring spherical microphone arrays for room acoustic analysis

Spherical microphone arrays offer several advantages over linear microphone arrays and single sensor microphones for room acoustic analysis. Some advantages are the ability to: a) steer the directional response in 3D space, b) change the beampattern shape (independent of the look direction) and c) spatial decomposition of the sound field into spherical harmonic orthonormal components. All of these features are available online and offline meaning that the analysis can be performed after the measurement has been done. We will present standard measurements such as spatially dependent reverberation time, diffuseness, etc. that take advantage of the spherical array decomposition of the soundfield. We will also revisit the spatial correlation function, a measure very suitable for sphercial array based room analysis. Results for various setups will be presented.