Interaural cross correlation in a sound field represented by spherical harmonics

Spatial impression is an important acoustic quality of concert halls. An accepted objective measure for spatial impression is the interaural cross-correlation (IACC) coefficient. Recently, spherical microphone arrays have been studied for room acoustics analysis and music recordings. This study presents a theoretical formulation for the computation of IACC using spherical-harmonics representations of the sound field, as measured by spherical microphone arrays, and spherical-harmonics representation of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), taken from HRTF databases. As spherical microphone arrays typically use a finite number of microphones, they may not be able to capture the complete spatial information in a sound field. Therefore, the effect of limited spherical-harmonics order on the accuracy of IACC approximation using the proposed method is studied using simulated and measured data. The method presented in this paper can be further used to study the effect of limited spatial information on the spatial perception of sound fields.