Acoustic opening is a
multichannel audio communications system. It consists of an array of
microphones in the transmitting room and an array of loudspeakers in
the receiving room. The goal is to provide listeners in the receiving
room an impression that there is only an opening, or a window, on the
wall between the two rooms. This can be done using a large number of
audio channels and performing rendering using wavefield synthesis
techniques. Nowadays, an acoustic opening can be built using standard
audio components. However, the problem how to code and transmit of a
huge number of highly correlated but nonidentical audio signals is
almost untouched. This coding problem is studied in the current
project. This work was started while Aki Härmä was working as a
postdoc in 2000-2001 at
Bell
Laboratories and, later,
Agere
Systems. The idea of an electro-acoustically created acoustic
opening was first introduced at Bell Laboratories nearly 70 years ago.
