# P-Reverb: Perceptual Characterization of Early and Late Reflections for Auditory Displays

## TL;DR

This paper introduces P-Reverb, a perceptual metric linking early and late sound reflections, enabling efficient estimation of reverberation parameters like RT60 for auditory displays.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel perceptually derived metric, P-Reverb, that accurately estimates reverberation characteristics from user perception data.

## Key findings

- P-Reverb accurately estimates RT60 in various environments.
- User evaluations show perceptual relevance of early and late reflection differences.
- The metric improves sound propagation algorithms for auditory displays.

## Abstract

We introduce a novel, perceptually derived metric (P-Reverb) that relates the just-noticeable difference (JND) of the early sound field(also called early reflections) to the late sound field (known as late reflections or reverberation). Early and late reflections are crucial components of the sound field and provide multiple perceptual cues for auditory displays. We conduct two extensive user evaluations that relate the JNDs of early reflections and late reverberation in terms of the mean-free path of the environment and present a novel P-Reverb metric. Our metric is used to estimate dynamic reverberation characteristics efficiently in terms of important parameters like reverberation time (RT60). We show the numerical accuracy of our P-Reverb metric in estimating RT60. Finally, we use our metric to design an interactive sound propagation algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on various benchmarks.