On the relevance of acoustic measurements for creating realistic virtual acoustic environments

TL;DR

This paper examines how different acoustical measurements and source directivity models affect the realism of virtual room acoustics simulations, comparing technical evaluations and perceptual listening tests.

Contribution

It investigates the impact of source directivity measurements on the perceptual quality of room acoustics simulations and proposes evaluation methods for simulation accuracy.

Findings

Including measured source directivity improves simulation realism.

Technical evaluation methods correlate with perceptual quality.

Perceptual tests favor simulations with accurate source directivity modeling.

Abstract

Geometrical approaches for room acoustics simulation have the advantage of requiring limited computational resources while still achieving a high perceptual plausibility. A common approach is using the image source model for direct and early reflections in connection with further simplified models such as a feedback delay network for the diffuse reverberant tail. When recreating real spaces as virtual acoustic environments using room acoustics simulation, the perceptual relevance of individual parameters in the simulation is unclear. Here we investigate the importance of underlying acoustical measurements and technical evaluation methods to obtain high-quality room acoustics simulations in agreement with dummy-head recordings of a real space. We focus on the role of source directivity. The effect of including measured, modelled, and omnidirectional source directivity in room acoustics simulations was assessed in comparison to the measured reference. Technical evaluation strategies to verify and improve the accuracy of various elements in the simulation processing chain from source, the room properties, to the receiver are presented. Perceptual results from an ABX listening experiment with random speech tokens are shown and compared with technical measures for a ranking of simulation approaches.