ASA 124th Meeting New Orleans 1992 October

4aAA3. A real-time multichannel room simulator.

William G. Gardner

Music and Cognition Group, MIT Media Lab., E15-491, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139

A room simulator has been developed as part of a project involving virtual acoustic environments. The system is similar to auditorium simulators for home use. The simulated reverberant field is rendered using four to six loudspeakers evenly spaced around the perimeter of a listening area. Listeners are not constrained to any particular orientation, although best results are obtained near the center of the space. The simulation is driven from a simple description of the desired room and the location of the sound source. The system accepts monophonic input sound and renders the simulated reverberant field in real time. Early echo generation is based on the source image model, which determines a finite impulse response filter per output channel. Diffuse reverberant field generation is accomplished using infinite impulse response reverberators based on nested and cascaded allpass filters. The system is implemented using Motorola 56001 digital signal processors, one per output channel. The talk will discuss implementation, design tradeoffs, and results.