Research project

Near field acoustic arrays for personal audio

Lead researchers:

Emeritus Professor Stephen Elliott
Research funder:

EPSRC
Status:

Not active

Project overview

When two people are listening to different audio signals in the same environment, each person wants to hear their own signal faithfully reproduced, with a minimum of interference from the other person's signal. An example would be two people sitting in adjacent seats in an aircraft or road vehicle, listening to different audio channels through loudspeakers in the seat headrests.This project investigates the physical requirements and performance of acoustic arrays designed to reproduce sound for a listener in their near field, but to produce as low a sound level as possible in other positions. Such an array could be used to generate personal audio for a listener, which would be private, and would not annoy other people nearby. Although acoustic arrays to generate known far field directivities are well known, the near field objectives in this case require new techniques to optimise the source strengths in the array and to design the array's geometry, particularly for finite-size sources, such as practical loudspeakers.