Sascha Spors1
, Rudolf Rabenstein2
, and Jens Ahrens1
1Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin University of Technology, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Germany
2Multimedia and Signal Processing, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Cauerstrasse 7, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Correspondence should be addressed to Sascha Spors (Sascha.Spors@telekom.de)
ABSTRACT
Wave field synthesis is a spatial sound field reproduction technique aiming at authentic reproduction of
auditory scenes. Its theoretical foundation has been developed almost 20 years ago and has been improved
considerably since then. Most of the original work on wave field synthesis is restricted to the reproduction
in a planar listening area using linear loudspeaker arrays. Extensions like arbitrarily shaped distributions
of secondary sources and three-dimensional reproduction in a listening volume have not been discussed in
a unified framework so far. This paper revisits the theory of wave field synthesis and presents a unified
theoretical framework covering arbitrarily shaped loudspeaker arrays for two- and three-dimensional reproduction.
The paper additionally gives an overview on the artifacts resulting in practical setups and briefly
discusses some extensions to the traditional concepts of WFS.