An acoustical array combining microphones and piezoelectric devices

This paper describes an acoustical array combining microphones and piezoelectric devices. Conventional microphone arrays have been widely utilized to realize noise reduction, sound separation and direction of arrival estimation system. However, when a conventional microphone array is mounted on a real system, such as a machine, vehicle or robot, the microphones are set extremely close to the system's actual body. In such cases, the noise from the system itself, such as motors, gears, and engines, namely internal noise, often becomes a troublesome problem. It is difficult to reduce internal noise utilizing a conventional microphone array because internal noise sources are extremely close to the microphones. As internal noise is not always stationary, statistically independent or sparse, most useful blind source separation approaches, such as independent component analysis and the sparseness approach, cannot be employed. Our aim is to reduce internal noise utilizing microphones and piezoelectric devices attached to the internal noise source. In this paper, a general description of the acoustical array is formulated and the characteristic features of microphones and piezoelectric devices in an acoustical array are given. An acoustical array combining microphones and piezoelectric devices is also described with some experimental results.