Waveguide-based Room Acoustics through Graphics Hardware

The modelling of room acoustics remains a difficult and computationally expensive task. Two main techniques exist, one focusing on the real physical wave-oriented sound propagation, while the other approximates sound waves using rays and ray-tracing techniques. One of the most popular wave-based technique are waveguide meshes, which simulate the propagation of sound using time domain difference models. In this paper we discuss a realtime implementation of the waveguide technique using fragment shaders and computer graphics hardware. Graphics hardware is well suited for parallel implementations and thus able to speedup the computation. Additionally, we discuss optimal sampling on hexagonal grids to further increase the computational efficiency. We compare both implementations and discuss the results achieved.

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