What is it about?
The pattern of reflections in a room shapes how music and speech sound. Being able to predict the reflections is an important part of architectural acoustic design. The paper outlines a new method for how this can be done that includes the diffraction and wave interference that many room acoustic models can only approximate.
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Why is it important?
Most wave-based reflection modelling yields a solution one frequency at a time. To build up a picture across many frequencies is laborious. What a listener hears is the effect of all frequencies arriving at once, and this is what the new model readily yields. It predicts the impulse response of the surface, in other words how a short sharp sound is reflected. This enables the reflection of a surface to be calculated more quickly when you're interested in a broad bandwidth or what to work in the time-domain.
Perspectives
The paper shows that it is possible to take some classical techniques from optics and combine them with approaches that are used in modern numerical methods such as time-domain Boundary Element Modelling. This then leaves the challenge of how to interpret the results, because we're not used to analyzing isolated reflections in rooms in terms of impulse responses. The hope is it will lead to more accurate predictions of reflections in rooms and new perspectives on the design of surfaces. I've also published code to make this easy to use.
Professor Trevor J Cox
University of Salford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fast time domain modeling of surface scattering from reflectors and diffusers, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, June 2015, Acoustical Society of America (ASA),
DOI: 10.1121/1.4921675.
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