Binaural Audio Rendering in the Spherical Harmonic Domain: A Summary of the Mathematics and its Pitfalls

Abstract

The present document reviews the mathematics behind binaural rendering of sound fields that are available as spherical harmonic expansion coefficients. This process is also known as binaural ambisonic decoding. We highlight that the details entail some amount peculiarity so that one has to be well aware of the precise definitions that are chosen for some of the involved quantities to obtain a consistent formulation. We also discuss what sets of definitions produce ambisonic signals that are compatible with the most common software tools that are available.