Comparison of psychoacoustic-based reverberance parameters

Abstract

This study compared psychoacoustic reverberance parameters to each other, as well as to reverberation time (RT) and early decay time (EDT) under various acoustic conditions. The psychoacoustic parameters were loudness-based RT (T), loudness-based EDT [EDT; Lee, Cabrera, and Martens, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131, 1194-1205 (2012a)], and parameter for reverberance [P; van Dorp Schuitman, de Vries, and Lindau., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 133, 1572-1585 (2013)]. For the comparisons, a wide range of sound pressure levels (SPLs) from 20 dB to 100 dB and RTs from 0.5 s to 5.0 s were evaluated, and two sets of subjective data from the previous studies were used for the cross-validation and comparison. Results of the comparisons show that the psychoacoustic reverberance parameters provided better matches to reverberance than RT and EDT; however, the performance of these psychoacoustic reverberance parameters varied with the SPL range, the type of audio sample, and the reverberation conditions. This study reveals that P is the most relevant for estimating a relative change in reverberance between samples when the SPL range is small, while EDT is useful in estimating the absolute reverberance. This study also suggests the use of P and EDT for speech and music samples, respectively.

Assessing the perceived reverberation in different rooms for a set of musical instrument sounds

“…these aspects requires further experimental data collection. In a broader context, this paper showed that perception-based predictions of a room acoustic indicator, in this case of reverberance (see also Lee et al, 2017), can be correlated with actual listening experiences in a room that depend on both "sound source" and "receiver." This is in contrast to established measurement guidelines (ISO 3382-1, 2009), where the acoustic properties of a room are considered as linear and time invariant, that is, room properties are assumed to be independent of the type of excitation, and of the level of the exciting signals.…”

Development of a BIM-Based Framework Using Reverberation Time (BFRT) as a Tool for Assessing and Improving Building Acoustic Environment

“…On the other hand, if the sized of the room is large and the sound source power is weak, it is advisable to achieve a higher RT to keep the sound audible at all points in the room. As can be observed, the choice of a suitable RT for a given enclosure depends on the final use of the room and the commitment/criterion to be reached in the design stages [9].…”

“…In this sense, an appropriate acoustic behaviour for a given indoor space should be already guaranteed from the early design phase, working with some potential available objective parameters to allow evaluating the acoustic characteristics of a room [6][7][8]. Among these parameters this work focus in the reverberation time, denoted as RT, which is certainly one of the most important variables or physical factors considered by experts in the design of interior spaces [9]. In fact, the RT is used as the key parameter in the acoustic assessment of enclosures.…”

Development of a clarity parameter using a time-varying loudness model

“…An issue here is that listening to a BRIR is different from listening to anechoic samples convolved with the same BRIR. Nevertheless, in previous studies (Lee et al, 2012;Lee et al, 2017), the reverberation parameters calculated from the loudness decay of a RIR outperformed significantly the conventional reverberation time and early decay time for various anechoic samples convolved with the same RIR. This is because the perceived decay of a RIR is a good match to the overall perceived reverberation decay of the convolution products (as a RIR is the only source of the reverberation of the convolution products).…”