Applications of short space-time Fourier analysis in digital acoustics

This paper presents a signal processing tool for analyzing and manipulating digitized acoustic wave fields, based on a spatio-temporal extension of the time-frequency representation space. The emphasis is on wave fields acquired with a 1-D linear array of equidistant microphones (representing the spatial samples), but the basic formulation is valid for the three dimensions of space. We start by defining a spatio-temporal extension of the short time Fourier transform, in both continuous and discrete space and time, and then focus on applications of the proposed representation. In particular, we show that acoustic scenes with multiple sources can benefit from the use of space-frequency analysis in applications such as source separation (spatial filtering) and spatial audio coding (wave field coding). The experiments suggest that there is a spatial window size for which the performance of filtering and coding is optimal.