P-Reverb: Perceptual Characterization of Early and Late Reflections for Auditory Displays
This work addresses the need for efficient perceptual metrics in auditory displays, which is incremental as it builds on existing concepts of sound field analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of characterizing early and late reflections in auditory displays by introducing a perceptually derived metric (P-Reverb) that relates just-noticeable differences, and showed its numerical accuracy in estimating reverberation time (RT60) and effectiveness in an interactive sound propagation algorithm.
We introduce a novel, perceptually derived metric (P-Reverb) that relates the just-noticeable difference (JND) of the early sound field(also called early reflections) to the late sound field (known as late reflections or reverberation). Early and late reflections are crucial components of the sound field and provide multiple perceptual cues for auditory displays. We conduct two extensive user evaluations that relate the JNDs of early reflections and late reverberation in terms of the mean-free path of the environment and present a novel P-Reverb metric. Our metric is used to estimate dynamic reverberation characteristics efficiently in terms of important parameters like reverberation time (RT60). We show the numerical accuracy of our P-Reverb metric in estimating RT60. Finally, we use our metric to design an interactive sound propagation algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on various benchmarks.