The different between simulated reverberation using corner speakers in the room and real reverberation - Research Paper Example

Another researcher has found that the effects of steady-state suppression are similar in simulated and real reverberant environments. Therefore, there are advances that are closing the gap between the simulated and real reverberant environments, and there are commonalities as well. The following describes the differences between the two environments as well as the common ground that they share. Simulated verses Real Reverberation Simulated reverberation creates a diotic sound field (like loudspeaker in front) prone to spectral cancellations. C.f.

to “amplitude mapping” / “summing localisation”. The diotic sound field may be replicated by the researcher, such as with the study done by Arai et al. (2007). They wanted to evaluate the effect of overlap-masking on speech intelligibility, so they conducted a study where they presented stimuli diotically through headphones connected to a computer. They were further able to adjust the sound level to the comfort of each subject. They found that the intelligibility of speech in reverberation was inversely correlated with the amount of overlap-masking (Arai et al., 2007, p. 440). . n acoustic field is considered to be perfectly diffuse in a volume V if the energy density is the same on all points of this volume V” (Nelisse & Nicola, 1997, p. 3517). According to Kopco and Shinn-Cunningham (2002), however, this diffusion depends upon where the listener is in the reverberant room.

For listeners in the center of the room, the reflective surfaces are located relatively far from the listener, which makes the sounds from all positions in the room diffuse to the listener. On the other hand, when the listener is close to a wall, early reflections are prominent, and these early reflections’ magnitude and timing depends upon where the source is in relation to the listener (Kopco & Shinn-Cunningham, 2002, p. 109). They also found that the reverberation effect on localization varies dramatically depending upon where the listener is positioned in the room, while the effects of room position on localization are modest (Kopco & Shinn-Cunningham, 2002, p. 112). On the other hand, Moorer (1979) found that diffusion is one of the reasons that simulating reverberation does not sound like real reverberation, and found that the effects of diffusion are most prominent when the walls are irregular, as opposed to flat, which is the case with most concert halls.

For instance, Moorer cites the case of the Boston Symphony Hall, with its fluted side walls and box well ceiling. This configuration causes a confusion of sounds which are caused by the multiplicity of the diffused sources of sounds that are reflected from every irregularity in the room. Therefore, everything but the first few images are washed out, which means that artificial reverberation has a difficult time simulating the acoustics of a concert hall, which is the source of real reverberation (Moorer, 1979,