Download Real Time Modeling of Acoustic Propagation in Complex Environments
In order to achieve high-quality audio-realistic rendering in complex environments, we need to determine all the acoustic paths that go from sources to receivers, due to specular reflections as well as diffraction phenomena. In this paper we propose a novel method for computing and auralizing the reflected as well as the diffracted field in 2.5D environments. The method is based on a preliminary geometric analysis of the mutual visibility of the environment reflectors. This allows us to compute on the fly all possible acoustic paths, as the information on sources and receivers becomes available. The construction of a beam tree, in fact, is here performed through a look-up of visibility information and the determination of acoustic paths is based on a lookup on the computed beam tree. We also show how to model diffraction using the same beam tree structure used for modeling reflection and transmission. In order to validate the method we conducted an acquisition campaign over a real environment and compared the results obtained with our real-time simulation system.
Download Rendering of an acoustic beam through an array of loudspeakers
This paper addresses the problem of rendering a virtual source through loudspeaker arrays. The orientation of the virtual source and its aperture determine its radial beampattern. The methodology we present here imposes that the wavefield in a predetermined listening area best approximates the desired wavefield in the least squares sense. With respect to the traditional techniques the number of constraints is much higher than the number of loudspeakers. As a consequence, the loudspeaker coefficient vector is the solution of an over-determined equation system. Moreover this system may be ill-conditioned. In order to solve these issues, we resort to a least squares inversion combined with a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to attenuate the problem of ill-conditioning. Some experimental results show the feasibility and the issues of this methodology.
Download Modeling the Impulse Response of Higher-Order Microphone Arrays Using Differentiable Feedback Delay Networks
Recently, differentiable multiple-input multiple-output Feedback Delay Networks (FDNs) have been proposed for modeling target multichannel room impulse responses by optimizing their parameters according to perceptually-driven time-domain descriptors. However, in spatial audio applications, frequency-domain characteristics and inter-channel differences are crucial for accurately replicating a given soundfield. In this article, targeting the modeling of the response of higher-order microphone arrays, we improve on the methodology by optimizing the FDN parameters using a novel spatially-informed loss function, demonstrating its superior performance over previous approaches and paving the way toward the use of differentiable FDNs in spatial audio applications such as soundfield reconstruction and rendering.