A hybrid acoustic model for room impulse response synthesis

Abstract

The prediction and synthesis of room impulse responses (RIR) has wide application from computer gaming to architectural acoustics. When a level of physical accuracy is important, a single acoustic modeling technique is usually limited by its computational load. Hybrid acoustic models target different time/frequency regions of the RIR with different modeling techniques. This paper introduces a hybrid acoustic model consisting of a physical FDTD model for low-mid frequencies, beam-tracing, and the acoustic radiance transfer method in the early part and late parts at high frequencies respectively. In this work, attention is given to establishing the equivalence of the boundary characteristics in each modeling domain. Good agreement is demonstrated indicating that mixing the separate model responses leads to an energetically consistent RIR.