Virtual acoustic prototyping

Abstract

In this paper the re-creation of 3-D sound fields so the full psycho-acoustic impact of sound sources can be assessed before the manufacture of a product or environment is examined. Using head related transfer functions (HRTFs) coupled with a head tracked set of headphones the sound field at the left and right ears of a listener can be re-created for a set of sound sources. However, the HRTFs require that sources have a defined location and this is not the typical output from numerical codes which describe the sound field as a set of distributed modes. In this paper a method of creating a set of equivalent sources is described such that the standard set of HRTFs can be applied in real time. A structural-acoustic model of a cylinder driving an enclosed acoustic field will be used as an example. It will be shown that equivalent sources can be used to recreate all of the reverberation of the enclosed space. An efficient singular value decomposition technique allows the large number of sources required to be simulated in real time. An introduction to the requirements necessary for 3-D virtual prototyping using high frequency Statistical Energy Analysis models will be presented. [Work supported by AuSim and NASA.]