Effect of listening level and background noise on the subjective decay rate of room impulse responses: Using time-varying loudness to model reverberance

Room impulse responses (RIRs) are used very widely to characterize the acoustic conditions of rooms, such as in the derivation of reverberation time, early decay time and clarity index. This study investigates the subjective decay rate (or reverberance) of RIRs when directly listened to (rather than convolved with a dry signal such as speech or music). Through a subjective experiment, it investigates the effects of gain (or listening level) and background noise level on the reverberance of RIRs that had been measured in three concert auditoria. The task of the experiment was to match the decay rate of RIRs to that of a reference RIR by ear, by adjusting the RIRs’ exponential decay rate. Based on objective loudness modeling, gain should have a positive effect on reverberance, and background noise has a negative effect. This is confirmed in the results of the experiment. Furthermore, the objectively calculated loudness decay function provides an effective predictor of subjective decay rate, which performs better than conventional early decay time or reverberation time for the RIRs tested.

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