Method and apparatus for concurrently estimating respective directions of a plurality of sound sources and for monitoring individual sound levels of respective moving sound sources

A method of estimating a direction of a sound source, as an angular value in relation to a fixed position, comprising steps of:

• in a fixed-length time window, operating on respective microphone output signals resulting from reception of sound emitted from said sound source during said time window, said microphone output signals produced from an array of M microphones, where M is a plural integer, to thereby extract from each of said microphone output signals a time-axis signal portion and thereby obtain a set of M audio signal portions with said set corresponding to said time window;
• applying frequency analysis to separate each said signal portion into a plurality of components corresponding to respectively different ones of a fixed set of frequencies;
• for each frequency of said fixed set, processing said components to obtain data expressing a frequency-based direction of a sound source with respect to a position in said microphone array, and
• calculating an average of respective frequency-based directions obtained for all frequencies of said fixed set, to thereby obtain an estimated direction corresponding to one time window;
• and
• successively repeating said succession of steps for each of a plurality of time windows that are of respectively identical time duration, to obtain a plurality of estimated directions respectively corresponding to said plurality of time windows.