Array technology for acoustic wave field analysis in enclosures

A method is proposed to calculate and measure impulse responses in an enclosure along closely spaced receiver arrays. Hence, instead of using a sparse distribution of receiver positions with single microphones, as is common practice now, arrays of microphones are applied to register the complex sound fields within enclosures. This way, there is a strong spatial correlation between adjacent responses, enabling one to analyze individual reflected wavefronts. It is shown that visualization of the recorded data in a two-dimensional domain, defined by detector position and travel time, gives a significantly improved insight in the structure of complex sound fields. This insight is further increased by applying the linear Radon transform (plane wave decomposition), yielding a representation of the data in the so-called ray parameter versus intercept time domain.