1. Higher-order finite difference time domain algorithms for room acoustic modelling
- Author
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van Mourik, J. and Murphy, Damian
- Subjects
620.2 - Abstract
The acoustic qualities of indoor spaces are fundamental to the intelligibility of speech, the quality of musical performances, and perceived noise levels. Computationally heavy wave-based acoustic modelling algorithms have gained momentum in the field of room acoustic modelling, as ever-increasing computational power makes their use more feasible. Most notably the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is often employed for rendering the low- and mid-frequency part of room impulse responses (RIRs). However, this algorithm has known disadvantages, most prominently dispersion error, which renders a large part of the simulated RIR invalid. This thesis is concerned with the implementation and analysis of higher-order FDTD stencils as a means to improve the current state-of-art FDTD methods that solve the room acoustic wave equation. A detailed analysis of dispersive properties, stability, and required grid spacing of current and higher-order stencils is presented, and has been verified using a GPU implementation of the different algorithms. It is argued that the 4th-order stencil gives the best result in terms of output quality versus computational effort. In addition, this thesis focusses on the derivation of absorbing boundaries for the 4th-order scheme, its stability analysis, and detailed analysis of absorptive properties compared to established boundary models for 2nd-order schemes. The newly proposed 4th-order scheme and its boundaries are tested in two case studies: a large shoebox model, in order to test the validity against a common benchmark and a complex acoustic space. For the latter study, impulse responses were measured in the National Centre for Early Music in York, UK, and computationally generated using the current state-of-the-art as well as the proposed 4th-order FDTD algorithm and boundaries. It is shown that the 4th-order stencil gives at least as good as, or better results than those achieved using the 2nd-order stencil, at lower computational costs.
- Published
- 2016