Efficient Synthesis of Room Acoustics via Scattering Delay Networks
This work addresses the need for efficient and realistic acoustic simulation in audio processing and virtual reality, offering a practical improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently simulating room acoustics by proposing a scattering delay network reverberator that accurately models physical properties like wall absorption and directional sources. The result is a method that matches the acoustic quality of the image method but with computational complexity one to two orders of magnitude lower, comparable to feedback delay networks, and negligible memory requirements.
An acoustic reverberator consisting of a network of delay lines connected via scattering junctions is proposed. All parameters of the reverberator are derived from physical properties of the enclosure it simulates. It allows for simulation of unequal and frequency-dependent wall absorption, as well as directional sources and microphones. The reverberator renders the first-order reflections exactly, while making progressively coarser approximations of higher-order reflections. The rate of energy decay is close to that obtained with the image method (IM) and consistent with the predictions of Sabine and Eyring equations. The time evolution of the normalized echo density, which was previously shown to be correlated with the perceived texture of reverberation, is also close to that of IM. However, its computational complexity is one to two orders of magnitude lower, comparable to the computational complexity of a feedback delay network (FDN), and its memory requirements are negligible.