Drone noise directivity and psychoacoustic evaluation using a hemispherical microphone array

This paper proposes an experimental setup for measuring the sound radiation of a quadrotor drone using a hemispherical microphone array. The measured sound field is decomposed into spherical harmonics, which enables the evaluation of the radiation pattern to non-probed positions. Additionally, the measurement setup allows the assessment of noise emission and psychoacoustic metrics at a wide range of angles. The obtained directivity patterns using a third-order spherical harmonic decomposition (SHD) are shown to exhibit low distortion with respect to the original measurements, therefore, validating the SHD as an adequate representation strategy. Furthermore, the noise emissions are evaluated, and the highest noise emission is observed in the 90 ° azimuth direction. The exterior spherical acoustic holography description is employed to evaluate psychoacoustic metrics at arbitrary far-field positions and validated on a reference microphone. The estimated psychoacoustic metrics are closely related to the target metrics, which allows for sound quality analysis at any point external to the drone.