Mobile maestro: Enabling immersive multi-speaker audio applications on commodity mobile devices

Abstract

The goal of this work is to provide an abstraction of ideal sound environments to a new emerging class of Mobile Multispeaker Audio (MMA) applications. Typically, it is challenging for MMA applications to implement advanced sound features (e.g., surround sound) accurately in mobile environments, especially due to unknown, irregular loudspeaker configurations. Towards an illusion that MMA applications run over specific loudspeaker configurations (i.e., speaker type, layout), this work proposes AMAC, a new Adaptive Mobile Audio Coordination system that senses the acoustic characteristics of mobile environments and controls individual loudspeakers adaptively and accurately. The prototype of AMAC implemented on commodity smartphones shows that it provides the coordination accuracy in sound arrival time in several tens of microseconds and reduces the variance in sound level substantially. Copyright © 2014 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).