Predicting Reverberance in Flat Rooms Using Time Varying Loudness Model

Room impulse responses(RIRs) have conventionally been used to derive acoustic parameters to assess acoustics of rooms. One of these parameters is reverberation time which is taken as a crucial measure for perceptual reverberance. Although this measure is not perfect on evaluation reverberance in many situations, especially when the sound decays are not exponential. This study investigates the reverberation in flat rooms using time varying loudness model. Through simulation of binaural impulse responses(BRIRs) in flat rooms , loudness decays were computed using time varying loudness model. As the room is highly disproportionate in dimension and the sound filed is less diffuse, the sound decays are typically nonexponential, therefore, the profile of loudness decay is significantly different from sound energy decay. Subjective test indicated that loudness reverberation time derived from loudness decay function correlates better to reverberance than conventional reverberation time in flat rooms. This study also investigates the effect of room proportion and diffusivity on the reverberance using loudness model