First Measurements of a Large-Aperture Microphone Array System for Remote Audio Acquisition

Poor sound pick up by remote microphones in multimedia applications, conference rooms and auditoria has traditionally hampered recording and communicating among spatially-separated groups. The culprits are reverberation (multipath distortion) and interfering acoustic noise. The typical solution is to obtain close-talking pick up from participants by passing microphones among talkers, or requiring individuals to approach a microphone station. Both are unsatisfactory, time-consuming, and inconvenient. The challenge is to obtain high-quality sound pick up from microphones far from the talker that do not encumber the user by hand-held, bodywom or tethered equipment. One solution is to apply an array of microphones and sophisticated signal processing. In this paper a brief description of a large, real-time, working system is presented and early results from using this system are given. Results include measured and theoretical signal-to-noise performance, beampatterns, and the dispersion of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICMCS
• Authors: Harvey F. Silverman, William R. Patterson III, Joshua M. Sachar
• Keywords: ICMCS 2000, Microphones, Multimedia, Remote Microphones, Sound Pick