Existing game engines and virtual reality software, use various techniques to render spatial audio. One such technique, binaural synthesis, is achieved through the use of head-related transfer functions, in conjunction with artificial reverberators. For virtual environments that embody a large number of concurrent sound sources, binaural synthesis will be computationally costly. The work presented in this paper aims to develop a methodology that improves overall performance by culling inaudible and perceptually less prominent sound sources in order to reduce performance implications. The proposed algorithm is benchmarked and compared with distance-based, volumetric culling methodology. A subjective evaluation of the perceptual performance of the proposed algorithm for acoustic scenes having different compositions is also provided.

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