Auralization of sound insulation in buildings

Abstract

In various surveys, it was found that people living in multi-family dwellings and apartment houses are annoyed by noise of their neighbors. Also, it seems that building regulations, for example, the German standard DIN 4109 “Sound insulation in buildings,” are insufficient. The degree of annoyance is influenced by the personal conditions of the habitants (stress), the value of the dwelling and the duration the habitants live there. The effects on humans include disturbance of conversation or listening to the TV or radio in private dwellings as well as communication in office premises, reduced power of concentration during physical or mental work, and disturbance of sleep. All this strongly depends on the kind of noise signal (speech, music, footfall, etc.) and on the context, and thus, it is highly doubtful if single-number quantities such as the STL sufficiently describe the real situation. In this paper, a technique is presented for auralization of complex virtual acoustic scenes including airborne and structure-borne noise in buildings with particular respect to sound propagation across or between coupled rooms. Based on SEA-like sound propagation models in standardized prediction methods (EN 12354), algorithms are designed for FIR filtering of audio signals and applied in listening tests and for to creation of audio demos. The auralized sounds can be used during building design processes, in studies of human noise perception, and in development of new metrics for future building codes.

Interactive real-time auralization of airborne sound insulation in buildings

“…At low frequencies the numerical methods, for example the Finite Element Method (FEM) [12] or semi-analytic methods [13], may provide a quick and efficient calculations of the structural response. These models, however, require computation times which exceed the limits of real-time processing (~50 ms) by orders of magnitude [4][5][6]. For this reason, statistical approaches are used, such as Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA).…”

“…its generation and transmission from walls, and the insulation characteristics of the direct and flanking walls elements between the offices. The auralization technique, in building acoustics, was first introduced by Vorländer and Thaden [5,6] and applied by Schlittmeier et al [7] in an experiment in auditory cognition on the irrelevant speech effect. Due to the fact that auralization can include excitation sounds and sound propagation models in a flexible way, it can be applied for creation of situation-specific stimuli for psychoacoustic tests of noise effects on human.…”

“…The specific sound pressure field can then be studied concerning its dependence on positions and orientations of sources. All building acoustics simulation methods [5,6,8] include the construction of sound insulation filters which were derived from ISO 12354 (Parts-I and III) [9,10]. Subsequently, these filters were used to calculate sound transmission paths from the source to the receiver, placed in adjacent rooms of a workplace.…”

“…Subsequently, these filters were used to calculate sound transmission paths from the source to the receiver, placed in adjacent rooms of a workplace. In [5,6,8], the building elements are compact in a way that a whole wall is represented by one transmission coefficient and as one secondary source with several simplifications. In the receiving room, the simplification in these models was made that the sound apparently radiates from one point (i.e.…”

“…In the receiving room, the simplification in these models was made that the sound apparently radiates from one point (i.e. the centre of the radiating receiver walls) representing the whole (bending) wave pattern on the wall [5]. For large walls this might be a too rough approximation compared with the spatially-distributed incident (transmitted) power on (from) the walls.…”