Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gugagore 2772 days ago
I think the (or perhaps only one) key phrase is "beamforming". A single microphone element has a certain sensitivity pattern (e.g. it may be a very directional microphone, or be equally sensitive in all directions). With multiple pick-ups, you can emulate some different sensitivity patterns.

A related idea in radar is synthetic-aperture radar (SAR).

1 comments

Great point.

A lot of the interesting things in audio were inspired by radar. Dan Wiggins at Sonos used to work on radar, and Don Keele created a loudspeaker technology called "CBT" that's based on radar technology.

Because microphones are basically the inverse of loudspeakers, what works in loudspeaker arrays can also work in microphone arrays.