Abstract:

The characteristics of a sound field are intrinsically linked to the geometric and spatial properties of the environment surrounding a sound source and a listener. The physics of sound propagation is captured in a time-domain signal known as a room im- pulse response (RIR). Prior work using neural fields (NFs) has allowed learning spatially-continuous representations of RIRs from finite RIR measurements. However, previous NF-based methods have focused on monaural omnidirectional or at most binaural listeners, which does not precisely capture the directional characteristics of a real sound field at a single point. We propose a direction-aware neural field (DANF) that more explicitly incorporates the directional information by Ambisonic- format RIRs. While DANF inherently captures spatial relations between sources and listeners, we further propose a direction- aware loss. In addition, we investigate DANF’s ability to adapt to new rooms in various ways including low-rank adaptation. Index Terms: spatial audio, neural acoustic field, room impulse response, Ambisonics