Sound Environment Reproduction for Health and Safety Studies Using Microphone Arrays, Wave Field Synthesis and the Lasso Minimizer

Industrial workplaces often offer poor intelligibility and audibility of alarms. One of the most important sound signals on the workplace is the reversing alarm. Incidents related to the audibility of these alarms range from minor injuries to death. Perceptual studies are required to mitigate that risk with appropriate solutions. Since it is difficult to conduct large perceptual studies on site, sound field reproduction of workers' sound environments is an interesting avenue. This paper presents the sound field reproduction of working environments using microphone arrays, wave field synthesis, and the lasso minimizer (1-norm regularization). The aim is to experimentally verify the potential of the lasso to increase the spatial contrast, or precision, since it favors sparsity in the driving signals. Indeed, there is a spatial blur often obtained using inverse problem with 2-norm regularization which leads to non-sparse solution. At the light of the experimental results, accurate in-laboratory sound field reproduction of working environments is possible. The lasso minimizer can enhance the spatial contrast of the loudspeaker driving signal.