Frequency-Domain Scattering Delay Networks for Simulating Room Acoustics in Virtual Environments

Modelling, simulation and auralisation of room acoustics plays an important role in computer games and virtual reality applications by increasing the level of realism. Accurate simulation of room acoustics is a computationally costly process which is often substituted with artificial reverberators that provide a computationally simpler alternative. However, such systems lack the accuracy and are not in general able to accurately simulate important aspects of room acoustics such as early reflections, source/microphone directivity, and frequency-dependent absorption. A new type of interactive and scalable room simulator named the scattering delay network (SDN) was recently proposed by the authors. A frequency-domain analysis and implementation of that simulator is presented in this paper. Numerical simulation examples which demonstrate the utility of the proposed system are provided.