An experimental study on transfer function estimation using acoustic modelling and singular value decomposition

Transfer functions relating sound source strengths and the sound pressure at field points are important for sound field control. Recently, two modal domain methods for transfer function estimation have been compared using numerical simulations. One is the spatial harmonic decomposition (SHD) method, which models a sound field with a series of cylindrical waves; while the other is the singular value decomposition (SVD) method, which uses prior sound source location information to build an acoustic model and obtain basis functions for sound field modelling. In this paper, the feasibility of the SVD method using limited measurements to estimate transfer functions over densely spaced field samples within a target region is demonstrated experimentally. Experimental results with various microphone placements and system configurations are reported to demonstrate the geometric flexibility of the SVD method compared to the SHD method. It is shown that the SVD method can estimate broadband transfer functions up to 3099 Hz for a target region with a radius of 0.083 m using three microphones, and allow flexibility in system geometry. Furthermore, an application example of acoustic contrast control is presented, showing that the proposed method is a promising approach to facilitating broadband sound zone control with limited microphones.