Modeling perceptual effects of reverberation on stereophonic sound reproduction in rooms
Thomas Zarouchas, John Mourjopoulos · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
The proposed model derives time-frequency maps to estimate perceived alterations due to reverberation in stereo audio signals reproduced in rooms. These alterations relate to monaural masking due to reverberant decay, derived via a computational auditory masking model and to inter-channel cues for the formation of the spatial position of the aural objects, derived via an inter-channel cue mapping module. The maps illustrate in detail the varying nature of the perceptually-relevant alterations due to room reverberation. Quantitative metrics are also introduced which were found to be proportional to reverberation interference, to room-reverberation time and to depend on the specific audio signal. A statistical approach classifies room response properties via their histogram distributions. Corresponding distributions were also applied to the proposed signal-dependent perceptual maps. Such distributions were found to be useful for interpreting the perceived alterations with different kinds of signals, such as music or speech.