Perceptual Comparison of Measured and Simulated Sound Fields in Small Rooms

Sound field simulations in small rooms, which are conducted by means of energy based geometrical acoustics (GA) tools, generally suffer from a physically inaccurate representation of the low to mid frequency range where the sound field is dominated by just a few distinct eigenmodes. In order to alleviate this problem we developed a combined simulation approach, where the frequency range below the Schroeder frequency fs is simulated by a finite element (FE) approach (to realistically capture the modal structure of the sound field) and the frequency range above is simulated using a hybrid GA approach. By means of subjective listening tests the present study investigates if the presented combined (FE-GA) approach yields “more realistic” simulation results than are obtained with purely GA based simulation tools. We therefore carried out measurements and simulations in three differently sized small rooms with largely varied acoustic characteristics. In the listening tests a perceptual comparison of measured and simulated sound fields was carried out, where the listeners were asked to assess the plausibility of the sound stimuli as well as the similarity between measured and simulated results.