Personal Sound Zones: Delivering interface-free audio to multiple listeners

TLDR

Personal sound zones aim to deliver audio to specific spatial regions while minimizing interference to others. The article systematically reviews challenges in multizone sound control and proposes a unified framework to compare two leading techniques. The authors formulate multizone control as an optimization problem, compare two state‑of‑the‑art techniques, introduce a wave‑domain sound‑field representation with active room compensation, and design directional loudspeaker arrays to improve field control and reduce speaker count. Directional loudspeaker arrays enable better wide‑area sound‑field control and fewer units, making them well suited for personal sound zones.

Abstract

Sound rendering is increasingly being required to extend over certain regions of space for multiple listeners, known as personal sound zones, with minimum interference to listeners in other regions. In this article, we present a systematic overview of the major challenges that have to be dealt with for multizone sound control in a room. Sound control over multiple zones is formulated as an optimization problem, and a unified framework is presented to compare two state-of-the-art sound control techniques. While conventional techniques have been focusing on point-to-point audio processing, we introduce a wave-domain sound field representation and active room compensation for sound pressure control over a region of space. The design of directional loudspeakers is presented and the advantages of using arrays of directional sources are illustrated for sound reproduction, such as better control of sound fields over wide areas and reduced total number of loudspeaker units, thus making it particularly suitable for establishing personal sound zones.