Evolutionary array optimization for multizone sound field reproduction

Multizone sound field reproduction aims to generate personal sound zones in a shared space with multiple loudspeakers. Traditional multizone sound field reproduction methods have focused on optimizing the source strengths given a preset array configuration. Recently, however, various methods have explored optimization of the loudspeaker locations. These can be categorized into sparse regularization and iterative methods with existing studies based on numerical simulations and mostly aiming at single-zone sound field reproduction. In this paper, unique experiments compare the state-of-the-art loudspeaker placement optimization methods by selecting a smaller number of loudspeakers from the candidates uniformly placed along a circle. An evolutionary array optimization scheme is proposed and shown to outperform the best existing methods in terms of mean square error in the bright zone and acoustic contrast between the bright and dark zones at frequencies below 1 kHz. The proposed evolutionary optimization scheme is simple, flexible, and can be extended to broadband optimization and other cost functions.