Continuous Measurement of Spatio-temporal Impulse Responses

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Sascha Spors
• Subject Area: Acoustics ; Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318346346

In virtual acoustics, multi-channel sound reproduction systems with an increasing number of loudspeakers have drawn considerable attention in research and development. The same holds for high-resolution headphone-based spatial sound reproduction. For the auralization of existing environments, for instance concert halls, both approaches rely on measured impulse responses. These impulse responses are captured from a sound source to various receiver positions in order to capture the spatio-temporal structure of a sound field in a reverberant environment. The measurement of spatially dense datasets of acoustic impulse responses is an important task in room acoustics and virtual acoustics. Several thousand impulse responses are typically required for an accurate spatio-temporal characterization of sound fields over the entire audible frequency range. When aiming at high spatial resolution, the capture of spatio-temporal impulse responses is often performed by sequential spatial measurements. The duration of the measurements is considerable (up to several hours). The continuous measurement of impulse responses by dynamic system identification techniques has proven to be a promising approach to significantly lower the measurement duration. This is key factor for the accuracy of the spatio-temporal representations of the captured sound field, since the sequential measurement technique relies on time-invariance of the medium. This project aims at an improvement of dynamic system identification by novel system models suited for time-varying acoustic systems, the extensions of continuous measurement techniques towards the efficient identification of dynamic multichannel systems, the development of a novel in-situ measurement technique for individual BRIRs, the practical realization of data-based sound field and binaural synthesis. The research is accompanied by a detailed (perceptual) evaluation of the derived methods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants