COMPARISON OF BLIND REVERBERATION TIME ESTIMATION IN AN ENCLOSED SPACE BY ANALYSING ENERGY DECAY CURVE
Nura Idris Muhammad, Muhammad Yahaya Abdullahi, Ahmad Baraya Aliyu · FUDMA Journal of Sciences · 2023
This paper presents a novel method for estimating reverberation time in an enclosed space by analyzing the energy decay curve.Reverberation time (RT) is a key parameter to determine the acoustic of a room and it provides an information about the quality and intelligibility of sound in an enclosure.RT can be determine directly from room acoustics, but in case where this is difficult to determine, it is estimated blindly from the reverberation speech.Blind reverberation time (BRT) is a method of measuring the reverberation time of a room without the use of any external equipment.It is based on the human auditory system's ability to detect and measure the decay of sound and acoustic properties of a room, which can be used to determine how suitable it is for certain activities, such as music or speech.In this study, we provide a study/comparison of two methods for BRT estimation.Data were collected from relevant papers as cited.Comparison of the two methods are carried out in terms of estimation error and effect on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).The methods were able to estimates the RT within 0.2sec for RT ≤ 0.8sec and SNR ≥ 10dB.Thus, the key effect of additive noise on all methods is a positive bias of the estimation error which results in estimation error of e ≥ 0.2sec, which is an over-estimation.The results obtained shows that the methods can be used to accurately compare the reverberation time in an enclosed space with minimal effort.