Development of a Personal Audio Performance Controller With Efficient, Fine, and Linear Tunable Functions

Abstract

Personal audio provides an independent sound space that can reduce auditory disturbances by creating a listening zone with the desired sound field and a quiet zone with a low sound pressure level (SPL). The performance of personal audio is assessed based on the difference in SPL between the listening and quiet zones as well as the accuracy of sound reproduction in the listening zone. There is a tradeoff relationship between the two performances, and the required performance depends on the usage environment and user preferences. Therefore, the performance of personal audio needs to be adjusted based on the user's evaluation. This paper describes the development of a personal audio performance controller. A performance controller should vary the performance of personal audio based on user feedback in real-time. In addition, it should be possible to fine-tune the performance, and the performance can vary linearly with respect to user inputs. To satisfy these conditions, the source weight traces of the loudspeaker array are modeled as simple and continuous functions that employ piecewise linear approximations, based on the change in performance. As a result, the performance changes for user input are made efficient, continuous, and linear. The proposed personal audio performance controller is verified using numerical simulations and experiments.

Keywords

• Loudspeaker array
• performance control
• performance trade-off
• personal audio
• piecewise linear approximation