Coding Principles for Virtual Acoustic Openings

Acoustic opening is a multichannel audio communications system. It consists of an array of microphones in the transmitting room and an array of loudspeakers in the receiving room. The goal is to provide listeners in the receiving room an impression that there is only an opening, or a window, on the wall between the two rooms. This can be done using a large number of audio channels and performing rendering using wavefield synthesis techniques. Nowadays, an acoustic opening can be built using standard audio components. However, the problem how to code and transmit of a huge number of highly correlated but nonidentical audio signals is almost untouched. This coding problem is studied in the current article. A general framework is formulated and some of alternative techniques are examined.