Maximizing the Psycho-Acoustic Sweet Spot

In this work, we let the sweet spot be the region where a sound wave generated by an array of loudspeakers is psycho-acoustically close to a desired auditory scene, and we develop a method that aims to generate a sound wave that directly maximizes this sweet spot. Our method incorporates psycho-acoustic principles from the onset and is flexible: while it imposes little to no constraints on the regions of interest, the arrangement of loudspeakers or their radiation pattern, it allows for a wide array of psycho-acoustic models that include state-of-the-art monaural psycho-acoustic models. Our method leverages tools from analysis and optimization that allow for its mathematical analysis and efficient implementation. Our numerical results show that our method yields larger sweet spots compared to some state-of-the-art methods when performing sound field reconstruction for sinusoidal signals using van de Par's psycho-acoustic model.