English

Open-source platforms for fast room acoustic simulations in complex structures

Audio and Speech Processing 2018-11-15 v1 Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Sound

Abstract

This article presents new numerical simulation tools, respectively developed in Matlab and Blender softwares. Available in open-source under the GPL 3.0 license, it uses a ray-tracing/image-sources hybrid method to calculate the room acoustics for large meshes. Performances are optimized to solve problems of significant size (typically more than 100,000 surface elements and about a million of rays). For this purpose, a Divide and Conquer approach with a recursive binary tree structure has been implemented to reduce the quadratic complexity of the ray/element interactions to near-linear. Thus, execution times are less sensitive to the mesh density, which allows simulations of complex geometry. After ray propagation, a hybrid method leads to image-sources, which can be visually analyzed to localize sound map. Finally, impulse responses are constructed from the image-sources and FIR filters are proposed natively over 8 octave bands, taking into account material absorption properties and propagation medium. This algorithm is validated by comparisons with theoretical test cases. Furthermore, an example on a quite complex case, namely the ancient theater of Orange is presented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.05784,
  title  = {Open-source platforms for fast room acoustic simulations in complex structures},
  author = {Matthieu Aussal and Robin Gueguen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.05784},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:15:14.934Z