Measurement of the normal acoustic impedance using beamforming method.

A beamforming technique is introduced to measure the normal acoustic impedance at both normal and oblique incidence in a free field. In the proposed method, microphone array signals are decomposed into incident and reflected waves using an adaptive nulling algorithm, which is a type of beamforming algorithm. The acoustic impedance can then be calculated from the ratio of these two signals. To obtain better results, the pressure vector commonly used in array signal processing is replaced with the transfer function vector between each microphone, and the white Gaussian noise is suppressed by a wavelet shrinkage technique. For an accurate experimental setup, the incident and reflected angles are estimated by the multiple signal classification method with spatial smoothing. The experiments conducted in a semi-anechoic room show that the proposed method is efficient and accurate in measuring the normal acoustic impedance of sound-absorbing materials under a free field condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]