High Order Spatial Audio Capture and Its 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 and presented. The sound capture is performed with a spherical microphone array. The sound field at the location, and in a region of space in the neighborhood, of the array is deduced from the captured sound and represented using either spherical wave-functions or plane-wave expansions. The representation is then transmitted to a remote location for immediate rendering or stored for later reproduction. 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 a Nyquist-like sampling criterion for the representation of the sound field are presented and verified.