Some simple and effective methods for sound source identification with geometrical acoustic models

The theoretical problem of sound source identification in an enclosed space is solved by minimizing a positive definite functional which is expressed in terms of the distance between the space distributions of the measured and the calculated acoustic pressures in a domain of the space. Two numerical methods for sound source identification are presented, it being assumed that the acoustic propagation in the space can be represented by geometrical acoustic models. The first method is used to determine the acoustic power of geometrically distinct, “point-like” sources, the reverberent sound field being assumed to be “almost” uniform. The second method, based on geometric acoustics ray theory, is designed for large scale sources which may generate non-uniform reverberant fields. For each method, an illustrative example is presented and the calculated acoustic powers are compared to measured ones.