Sound Field Synthesis Toolbox

An open source toolbox for Sound Field Synthesis (SFS) is introduced. The toolbox is able to numerically simulate sound fields synthesized by SFS methods like Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) or higher order Ambisonics (HOA). Various loudspeaker driving signals for the mentioned methods are provided for 2-, 2.5and 3-dimensional synthesis. The toolbox allows mono-frequent as well as broadband excitation signals. The latter enables to generate snapshots of the spatio-temporal impulse response of a chosen reproduction technique. The toolbox furthermore includes the computation of binaural room impulse responses (BRIR) for a given SFS setup. These can be used to simulate different sound field synthesis methods via binaural resynthesis. The toolbox is provided for Matlab/Octave and comes with an online documentation. Introduction Sound field synthesis offers the possibility to create a determined sound field within an extended listening area. Common methods to reach this in reality are Wave Field Synthesis or higher order Ambisonics which apply different kinds of driving signals to a loudspeaker array in order to control the sound field within the listening area. For real loudspeaker setups the SoundScape Renderer (SSR) [1] can provide such driving signals. The SSR is an open source software, which is also developed by our group. To investigate the properties of different sound field synthesis methods and implementations, it is preferable to simulate their behavior beforehand. To close this gap, the Sound Field Synthesis Toolbox provides functions to numerically simulate WFS and HOA for 2-, 2.5-, and 3-dimensional synthesis (see e.g. [2]). These functions provide simulations for the sound fields of mono-frequent as well as broadband virtual sources. The latter allows to generate snapshots of the spatio-temporal impulse response for a given SFS method. As an alternative to applying expensive, real loudspeaker setups, dynamic binaural synthesis can simulate different loudspeaker setups to evaluate sound field synthesis methods (e.g. [3],[4]). Therefore, binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) are convolved with driving signals to simulate a synthesized sound field via headphones. The Sound Field Synthesis Toolbox can compute these BRIR data sets by applying the driving functions that are used for the simulation of the sound fields. Access The Sound Field Synthesis Toolbox is freely available under the GNU General Public License v3 and can be downloaded at http://dev.qu.tu-berlin.de/projects/sfs-toolbox/files It comes with detailed built-in help, available via the help function within Matlab/Octave. An additional wiki page provides online help, a tutorial for the first steps and different use cases at http://dev.qu.tu-berlin.de/projects/sfs-toolbox/wiki