A new method for auralisation of airborne sound insulation

Abstract

Auralisation techniques have quickly grown in popularity during the last few years, mostly due to their application in virtual reality, the gaming industry and room acoustics. The application of auralisation to sound insulation has also become a valuable tool to assess the sound insulation of buildings, and to suitably describe to the non-acousticians how is the sound experience hidden behind the swarm of acoustic quantities. Auralisation is used now in commercial software to show the relevance of some acoustic features that are often not well-understood by users and constructors until too late.This paper presents a new method to compute the binaural sound transmission between rooms. As the established method, this approach makes use of the EN 12354 sound insulation predictions to build up the auralisation of the sound insulation predictions. In addition, it takes into account the spatial variation of the sound pressure field inside arbitrarily shaped rooms, enabling the user to experience binaural sound from arbitrary sound sources and varying the source and receiver position. Additionally, the method addresses the problem of synthesising the room impulse response from the one-third octave band values of the reverberation time obtained as per ISO 3382-2:2008.The new method increases interaction with the simulated environment creating a deeper, more realistic and immersive scene and leading to more accurate subjective evaluations of sound insulation.