Virtual Microphones for Multichannel Audio Resynthesis

Multichannel audio offers significant advantages for music reproduction, including the ability to provide better localization and envelopment, as well as reduced imaging distortion. On the other hand, multichannel audio is a demanding media type in terms of transmission requirements. Often, bandwidth limitations prohibit transmission of multiple audio channels. In such cases, an alternative is to transmit only one or two reference channels and recreate the rest of the channels at the receiving end. Here, we propose a system capable of synthesizing the required signals from a smaller set of signals recorded in a particular venue. These synthesized “virtual” microphone signals can be used to produce multichannel recordings that accurately capture the acoustics of that venue. Applications of the proposed system include transmission of multichannel audio over the current Internet infrastructure and, as an extension of the methods proposed here, remastering existing monophonic and stereophonic recordings for multichannel rendering.