Synthesis of room responses using virtual source distribution with application in 3D audio reverberator design

摘要

The reverberator is a key element in 3D audio reproduction. Conventional methods for synthesizing reverberation are either computationally expensive or fail to produce natural sensation of environmental settings. This paper proposes a technique to overcome these difficulties by employing a virtual source approach. Unlike other complex numerical schemes, e.g., BEM or FEM, this method is based on a simple representation of the sound field with a distribution of discrete simple sources on the boundary. The complex strengths of the virtual sources are then calculated by solving a matrix inverse problem. The constant-Q filtering property of human hearing is also exploited during reverberator synthesis to further simplify the computation. A shoebox model and a concert hall model were used to verify the proposed method. Subjective tests demonstrated that the present synthesis technique is capable of conferring remarkable realism of reverberation, as compared to the measured room response.