Microphone array technology has been proposed for various audio, teleconference, hearing aid, and voice recognition applications. By forming a focused beam toward the desired speech source, attenuating background noises and rejecting discrete spatial interferers, a microphone array can enhance the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in a noisy environment with notable improvement in speech intelligibility. At the threshold of intelligibility, an one dB improvement in SNR can increase 10-15% speech intelligibility. It is also known increasing SNR can result in significant improvement in the recognition rate of various automatic voice recognition systems. We propose an novel electronically steerable microphone array based on the Maximum Energy (ME) concentration criterion, which results in high SNR in rooms with reverberations and competing interferences. We present a prototype PC-based microphone array system designed for hearing aid applications but also applicable to other tasks. In section 1, a multiple channel microphone array system is described. The autonomous system's basic operations of signal-enhancement, beamformation, and detection-and-tracking are defined as processing mode, calibration mode, and search mode respectively which are presented in section 2,3 and 4. Algorithms using ME beamformation array weights obtained from the solution of a generalized eigenvalue problem utilizing non-ideal microphone characteristics and modified broadband near-field MUSIC schemes are discussed. Some array performance results based on both computer simulation and real-time measurement are presented.