Proceedings of the 11th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum / EuroNoise 2025


Málaga, Spain
June 23 - 26, 2025





Session: A15.01 Room acoustics - General
Date: Tuesday 24 June 2025
Time: 17:20
Title: Quantum-inspired Reverberation using Ray Tracing Method
Author(s): Juliette Tudoce
Antoine Reserbat-Plantey
Reiko Yamada
Maciej Lewenstein
Pages: 3685-3688
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2025.0395
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2025/data/articles/000395.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Reverberation—the persistence of sound in a cavity due to reflections—is a frequency-dependent phenomenon central to spatial audio and acoustic design. In this work, we draw an analogy with cavity quantum electrodynamics (CQED), where light waves confined in cavities interact with matter through distance-dependent dipolar couplings mediated by virtual photons. Inspired by this framework, we propose a novel method for simulating acoustic reverberation using a ray-based model [1] inspired by quantum dipolar interactions [2]. Traditional ray-tracing models often rely on fixed or empirical reflection coefficients, which do not capture the spatially varying interaction strengths characteristic of CQED. To address this, we introduce quantum-inspired interaction models translated into distance-dependent gain functions. These functions are embedded into a 2D geometric ray tracing engine to compute synthetic impulse responses in a rectangular cavity. A comparison of the impulse responses across four interaction models demonstrates that stronger distance dependence results in sharper attenuation of late reflections. This approach offers a new perspective for physically grounded, tunable reverberation modeling with potential applications in sound synthesis and cross-domain analog simulations.