HOA Recording Corpus

A corpus of Higher-Order Ambisonics recordings spanning seven years of field sessions across the Tricity region and beyond — including concert halls, churches, outdoor urban and natural environments, and a VR film cave set. Captured using spherical microphone arrays up to 5th order (Zylia ZM-1, Harpex Spcmic, RODE NT-SF1), the corpus provides a systematic resource for spatial audio codec evaluation, microphone array benchmarking, and perceptual research.

The corpus includes a dedicated microphone comparison session with parallel recordings from three arrays in identical acoustic conditions. Dataset published on Bridge of Data, Gdańsk Tech. Companion paper submitted to Archives of Acoustics (2026).

Microphone array comparison (AES 2026). Analysis of the ZM-1 (3rd order) and Harpex Spcmic (5th order) using spectral energy, loudness, spatial energy distribution, and directional metrics shows the ZM-1 exhibits approximately 27.4 dB rolloff from 0th to 3rd order compared to ~8.4 dB for the Spcmic. Reproducible Python analysis pipeline available on PG GitLab. Presented as an Express Paper at the AES 160th Convention, Copenhagen (2026).

@article{mroz_spatial_energy_2026,
  title = {Spatial energy distribution in spherical microphone arrays: a seven-year {HOA} corpus study},
  author = {Mróz, Bartłomiej and Zaporowski, Szymon},
  journal = {Archives of Acoustics},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Under review}
}