Diffuse Reverberation and Interactive Directional Sound Source Rendering in TASCAR
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Virtual acoustic environments are increasingly used in hearing aid research to provide reproducible environments representative for everyday situations. Simulation of early and late reflections as well as rendering of directional and moving sound sources are important features for a plausible reproduction. For example, distance perception in enclosed spaces is dominated by the ratio of direct to reverberant sound. For the perception of self motion, the time-variant simulation of early reflections is important, which results in perceptually relevant dynamic comb filter effects. TASCAR is an open toolbox for the creation of virtual acoustic environments, which implements dynamic directional sources combined with early and late reverberation and allows investigating the features mentioned above.In this study, a simple feedback-delay-network (FDN) based approach of diffuse reverberation was compared with recorded binaural impulse responses and recorded impulse responses in First Order Ambisonics rendered to binaural signals. Results indicate that, despite perceptual differences between recorded and simulated reverberation, a plausible simulation of rooms can be achieved with the simple FDN. For a perceptually correct reproduction, however, other methods like, e.g., the more complex FDN RAZR, should be preferred. Furthermore, the interaction between source movement, early reflections and reverberation was perceptually investigated for directional sources.