From rays back to waves—Models and challenges for room impulse response synthesis

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 159, pp. A242

Abstract

In room acoustics, ray tracing algorithms and their variants are widely used to predict a room’s energy decay. With the purpose of creating room auralizations, a room impulse response (RIR) is subsequently synthesized from the simulated decay. This synthesis can account not only for energy decay information but also for the rays’ directions of arrival and geometric data of the room. To model the reflection density, this process also requires data such as the room’s volume, the mean free path length or information of the boundary conditions. While existing models for this synthesis process can model RIRs adequately for many room situations, relevant deviations can be observed in more special situations such as in semi-open spaces, in the transition area between rooms and outdoor environments or in the vicinity of heavily diffusing surfaces. This work presents the process of generating RIRs from ray tracing results and discusses model adjustments that improve robustness for these challenging scenarios.

Authors 3

1. Lukas Aspöck Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IHTA, RWTH Aachen Univ., Aachen 52074, Germany, las@akustik.rwth-aachen.de

2. Michael Vorländer
3. Janina Fels Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IHTA, RWTH Aachen Univ., Aachen, Germany