Acoustic Space-Sharing with Multiple Parametric Array Loudspeakers for Daily Sports and Exercise

Overview & Synopsis

Recently, sports and exercise become important for maintaining health in our daily life. We often enjoy the exercise such as dance and fitness with some music. When we reproduce music from a dynamic loudspeaker in one room, everyone in the room hears the music. Therefore, only one exercise can be done in the room and people who want to do other exercises have to find another room. To share the room by different group, we propose an exercise support system utilizing an acoustic sound. In particular, we propose the acoustic space-sharing system with the parametric array loudspeaker (PAL) for daily sports and exercise. The PAL can reproduce the acoustic sound only on a straight line by utilizing straightness of an ultrasonic wave. In the proposed method, we arrange some PALs considering the size of the room and directional characteristics of them, such as the directional angle and the sound attenuation distance. Using this system, we can reproduce multiple music signals in one room without a physical separation like a wall and it is expected that people can take multiple exercises in the same room, for example, dance on the left half and fitness on the right half. Furthermore, it is considered that exchanges among people doing each activity will also become active and people's exercise will be promoted further. In this paper, we actually constructed the gymnasium with the acoustic space-sharing system for daily sports and exercise by formulating suitable positions of PALs in the proposed method, and carried out performance evaluation experiment for the acoustic space-sharing in the gymnasium. In this experiment, we divide the gymnasium into two areas, and evaluate the sound pressure distribution and signal to noise ratio in each area. From the result of the experiment, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed system.