Sound Zones Without the Handcuffs: Teaching Neural Networks to Bend Acoustic Space
Sound is usually treated as a room problem. Put speakers in a space, measure the space, tune the system, then hope the listener does not move too much. Very elegant. Also very inconvenient. Personal sound zones push this problem into sharper form. The goal is simple to describe: one listener hears a desired acoustic scene in a bright zone, while another nearby area stays quiet or hears something else in a dark zone. In practice, the system depends on loudspeaker pre-filters designed from measured acoustic transfer functions. Those measurements are not just “some room data.” They are tied to where microphones were placed. Change the target scene, change the microphone grid, or reduce the number of measurement points, and the old optimization pipeline starts wearing handcuffs. ...