A Method for Capturing and Reproducing Directional Reverberation in Six Degrees of Freedom
This work addresses the challenge of real-time directional reverberation reproduction for immersive audio applications, such as cultural heritage preservation, but is incremental as it builds on existing methods for efficient reproduction.
The authors tackled the problem of computationally expensive six-degrees-of-freedom auralization for immersive acoustics by proposing a framework that extracts directional decay properties from spatial impulse responses to characterize a directional feedback delay network, using data from the Finnish National Opera and Ballet auditorium to illustrate the method.
The reproduction of acoustics is an important aspect of the preservation of cultural heritage. A common approach is to capture an impulse response in a hall and auralize it by convolving an input signal with the measured reverberant response. For immersive applications, it is typical to acquire spatial impulse responses using a spherical microphone array to capture the reverberant sound field. While this allows a listener to freely rotate their head from the captured location during reproduction, delicate considerations must be made to allow a full six degrees of freedom auralization. Furthermore, the computational cost of convolution with a high-order Ambisonics impulse response remains prohibitively expensive for current real-time applications, where most of the resources are dedicated towards rendering graphics. For this reason, simplifications are often made in the reproduction of reverberation, such as using a uniform decay around the listener. However, recent work has highlighted the importance of directional characteristics in the late reverberant sound field and more efficient reproduction methods have been developed. In this article, we propose a framework that extracts directional decay properties from a set of captured spatial impulse responses to characterize a directional feedback delay network. For this purpose, a data set was acquired in the main auditorium of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet in Helsinki from multiple source-listener positions, in order to analyze the anisotropic characteristics of this auditorium and illustrate the proposed reproduction framework.