Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum 2023


Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy
September 11 - 15, 2023





Session: A11-01: Spatial Hearing: Modeling and Applications - Part I
Date: Monday 11 September 2023
Time: 15:00 - 15:20
Title: Reproduction of simulated acoustic scenes with limited number of loudspeakers in a reverberant room
Author(s): A. Fallah, Carl von Ossietzky University, Medical Physics and Acoustics, Acoustics Group, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
S. Gündert, Carl von Ossietzky University, Medical Physics and Acoustics, Acoustics Group, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
C. Kirsch, Carl von Ossietzky University, Medical Physics and Cluster of Excellence Hearing4All, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
S. Nakamura, Carl von Ossietzky University, Medical Physics and Acoustics, Acoustics Group, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
S. Van De Par, Carl von Ossietzky University, Medical Physics and Acoustics, Acoustics Group, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
Pages: 285-292
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2023.0439
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2023/data/articles/000439.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

When reproducing virtual acoustic scenes in a reverberant playback room, the acoustics of the playback room degrades the reproduction. Until now, these scenes can only be optimally rendered on dedicated loudspeaker setups placed in an anechoic room using e.g. Ambisonics or wave field synthesis. When using virtual scenes in clinical applications it is desirable to reproduce the sound field with a limited number of loudspeakers in a small reverberant room. Recently we have developed the Acoustic Room Transformation (ART) method based on an Ambisonics recording and a reproduction that perceptually compensates the reverberation of the playback room (Fallah and van de Par, Forum Acusticum, 2021) by separately capturing and reproducing an optimized version of the direct and reverberant sound fields. Interestingly, when a virtual acoustic scene is created with a room acoustical simulator (e,g., with RAZR, Wendt et al., JAES, 62, 11 ,2014), the direct and reverberant sound fields are separately available inherently. In this study, the perceptually-based ART method is used to render simulated acoustic environments using only 4 loudspeakers in a reverberant room. A sound-quality evaluation shows that the directional and spectral characteristics of reproduced sound are better preserved when using the ART method compared to standard playback.