SOFTWARE FOR THE SIMULATION, PERFORMANCE ANALISYS AND REAL-TIME IMPLEMENTATION OF WAVE FIELD SYNTHESIS SYSTEMS FOR 3D-AUDIO

Wave Field Synthesis is a method for 3D sound reproduction, based on the precise construction of the desired wave field by using an array of loudspeakers. The main purpose of this work is to present a set of software tools that brings to the audio community a feasible an easy way to start working with wave field synthesis systems. First in the paper, an introduction to different 3D sound techniques and an overview of WFS theory and foundations are given. Next, a series of software tools specially developed to simulate, analyze and implement WFS systems are presented. The first software module helps the user in the design of the array of loudspeakers to be employed in the reproduction by computing the equations for each speaker signal excitation. Another tool simulates the wave field generated by the arrays and analyses both performance and quality of the acoustic field. Finally a user friendly tool for realtime convolution capable of producing the excitation signals for the array of loudspeakers is presented. Also, different experiments that have been carried out with this software in order to evaluate the precision and behaviour of different WFS configurations are presented and interpreted.