Investigation on Ecological Validity within Higher Order Ambisonics Reproductions of Wind Turbine Noisescapes

Spatial sound field recordings and subsequent reproduction became more popular recently due to the availability of high quality microphone arrays, improved computational abilities and sophisticated spatial audio reproduction technologies. In the context of soundscape evaluation, valid reproducibility of the captured sound fields plays an important role. One key condition for this is, that all relevant qualitative characteristics of the soundscape are not a ected by the reproduction tool chain and therefore ecological validity is preserved. This work investigates how acoustic properties might be impaired by higher-order Ambisonics soundscape reproduction. Therefore, an artificial noisescape was recorded with a spherical microphone array, coded into 4th-order Ambisonics and reproduced with a dedicated loudspeaker system. Both the original and the reproduced noisescape were subsequently investigated in terms of acoustic properties that have an influence on the psychoacoustic perception. This investigation contributes to the interdisciplinary research project WEA-Akzeptanz which aims at a holistic characterization of sound emission, propagation and perception of wind turbine noise.