Subjective Evaluations of Perspective Control Microphone Array (PCMA)

Perspective Control Microphone Array (PCMA) is a technique that allows one to flexibly render spatial audio images depending on the desired virtual listening position in a reproduced soundfield. Two subjective listening experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of PCMA on controlling perceived auditory distance and width as these attributes were considered to be relevant to perspectives created at different seating positions in a concert hall. The first experiment examined the relationship between perceived distance and width at three different source-listener distances in a concert hall using anechoic trumpet and conga sources convolved with binaural room impulse responses. It was found that perceived width decreased as the source-listener distance increased. It was also shown that the perceived magnitudes linearly changed at doubled distances. The second experiment tested three reference virtual array configurations of PCMA on the same attributes using the same sources and an orchestra recording. It was found that perceived distance and width significantly varied for different PCMA configurations in highly similar ways as the results of the previous experiment. These results seem to strongly validate the effectiveness of PCMA for post-production and user-interactive applications.