Computations of the Directivity of Spherical Microphone Arrays

The aim of this research is to create a microphone array on a rigid sphere that could be used for teleconferences and for recording of music with the aim of five-channel loudspeaker surround sound reproduction. Experiments were undertaken, within a MATLAB environment, by running computer simulations that tested the directivity of a rigid sphere microphone array in both near and far field. The simulations performed calculated the directivity of three different microphone arrays with 128 microphones: placed circularly around a rigid sphere, placed uniformly distributed in a rigid sphere and placed randomly distributed in a rigid sphere. It is shown that the directivity of the array of microphones placed uniformly in the sphere show a better directivity than the other arrays since it shows a narrower mainlobe and less sidelobes.