From the sound up: Reverse-engineering room shapes from sound signatures

Abstract

Typically, architects and acousticians design rooms for music starting from a model room shape known from past experience to perform well acoustically. We reverse the typical design process by using a model sound signature to generate room shapes. Our method builds off previous research on reconstructing room shapes from recorded impulse responses, but takes an instrumental, design-oriented approach. We demonstrate how an abstract sound signature constructed in a hybrid image source-statistical acoustical simulator can be translated into a room shape with the aid of a parametric design interface. As a proof of concept, we present a study in which we generated a series of room shapes from the same sound signature, analyzed them with commercially available room acoustic software, and found objective parameters for comparable receiver positions between shapes to be within just-noticeable-difference ranges of each other.