An Interactive and Intelligent Tool for Microphone Array Design

This engineering brief will present a new microphone array design app named MARRS (microphone array recording and reproduction simulator). Developed based on a novel psychoacoustic time-level trade-off algorithm, MARRS provides an interactive, object-based workflow and graphical user interface for localization prediction and microphone array configuration. It allows the user to predict the perceived positions of multiple sound sources for a given microphone configuration. The tool can also automatically configure suitable microphone arrays for the user’s desired spatial scene in reproduction. Furthermore, MARRS overcomes some of the limitations of existing microphone array simulation tools by taking into account microphone height and vertical orientations as well as the target loudspeaker base angle. The iOS and Android app versions of MARRS can be freely downloaded from the Apple App Store and the Resources section of the APL website: https://www.hud.ac.uk/apl, respectively.