Adding air attenuation to simulated room impulse responses: A modal approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modal-based offline method to incorporate air attenuation into simulated room impulse responses, improving the realism of high-frequency attenuation effects in room acoustics simulations.

Contribution

A novel modal scheme for adding frequency-dependent air absorption to existing room impulse responses post-simulation.

Findings

The method effectively models high-frequency air attenuation.

Comparison shows advantages over existing filter-based approaches.

Numerical examples validate the accuracy of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Air absorption is an important effect to consider when simulating room acoustics as it leads to significant attenuation in high frequencies. In this study, an offline method for adding air absorption to simulated room impulse responses is devised. The proposed method is based on a modal scheme for a system of one-dimensional dissipative wave equations, which can be used to post-process a room impulse response simulated without air absorption, thereby incorporating missing frequency-dependent distance-based air attenuation. Numerical examples are presented to evaluate the proposed method, along with comparisons to existing filter-based methods.