3D Microphone Array Comparison Part 2: Elicitation of Salient Perceptual Attributes

Posted on 9 March 2026 by APL

Our new paper has been published in this month’s issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. This work from Miki Morinaga’s Masters by Research project, supervised by Prof Hyunkook Lee at APL, identifies salient perceptual attributes of 3D microphone arrays and shows that the off-centre listening positions in immersive audio playback can lead to greater variations in the perceived differences among the arrays. Tonal attributes such as clarity, fullness,and brightness were found to be particularly salient in off-centre positions.

This paper forms Part 2 of the 3D Microphone Array Comparison (3D-MARCo) research series. Part 1 focused on objective measurements of the arrays, which provide theoretical explanations for some of the findings reported in this paper. Since the 3D-MARCo open-access database of high-quality 3D mic array recordings was published in 2019, it has been downloaded 43,000 times, and has generated numerous academic and industrial impacts, helping engineers, educators, students and researchers learn how to capture 3D sounds, and more broadly, how to listen to and evaluate spatial audio. The journey is still continuing, inspiring our sister ECHO-Project as well as other spatial audio and AI research projects. Part 3 will come one day.