This paper details a software implementation of an acoustic camera, which utilises a spherical microphone array and a spherical camera. The software builds on the Cross Pattern Coherence (CroPaC) spatial filter, which has been shown to be effective in reverberant and noisy sound field conditions. It is based on determining the cross spectrum between two coincident beamformers. The technique is exploited in this work to capture and analyse sound scenes by estimating a probability-like parameter of sounds appearing at specific locations. Current techniques that utilise conventional beamformers perform poorly in reverberant and noisy conditions, due to the side-lobes of the beams used for the powermap. In this work we propose an additional algorithm to suppress side-lobes based on the product of multiple CroPaC beams. A Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plug-in has been developed for both the transformation of the time-domain microphone signals into the spherical harmonic domain and the main acoustic camera software; both of which can be downloaded from the companion web-page.

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Decomposing a sound-field into its individual components and respective parameters can represent a convenient first-step towards offering the user an intuitive means of controlling spatial audio effects and sound-field modification tools. The majority of such tools available today, however, are instead limited to linear combinations of signals or employ a basic single-source parametric model. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present a parametric framework, which seeks to overcome these limitations by first dividing the sound-field into its multi-source and ambient components based on estimated spatial parameters. It is then demonstrated that by manipulating the spatial parameters prior to reproducing the scene, a number of sound-field modification and spatial audio effects may be realised; including: directional warping, listener translation, sound source tracking, spatial editing workflows and spatial side-chaining. Many of the effects described have also been implemented as real-time audio plug-ins, in order to demonstrate how a user may interact with such tools in practice.

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