High Order Spatial Audio Capture and Binaural Head-Tracked Playback over Headphones with HRTF Cues

A theory and a system for capturing an audio scene and then rendering it remotely are developed andpresented. The sound capture is performed with a spherical microphone array. The sound field at the location
of the array is deduced from the captured sound and is represented using either spherical wave-functions or
plane-wave expansions. The sound field representation is then transmitted to a remote location for immediate
rendering or stored for later use. The sound renderer, coupled with the head tracker, reconstructs the acoustic
field using individualized head-related transfer functions to preserve the perceptual spatial structure of the
audio scene. Rigorous error bounds and Nyquist-like sampling criterion for the representation of the sound
field are presented and verified.