Audioptimization : global-based acoustic design

Abstract

Acoustic design is a difficult problem, because the human perception of sound depends on such things as decibel level, direction of propagation, and attenuation over time, none of which are tangible or visible. The advent of computer simulation and visualization techniques for acoustic design and analysis has yielded a variety of approaches for modeling acoustic performance. However, current computer-aided design and simulation tools suffer from two major drawbacks. First, obtaining the desired acoustic effects may require a long, tedious sequence of modeling and/or simulation steps. Second, current techniques for modeling the propagation of sound in an environment are prohibitively slow and do not support interactive design. This thesis presents a new approach to computer-aided acoustic design. It is based on the inverse problem of determining material and geometric settings for an environment from a description of the desired performance. The user interactively indicates a range of acceptable material and geometric modifications for an auditorium or similar space, and specifies acoustic goals in space and time by choosing target values for a set of acoustic measures. Given this set of goals and constraints, the system performs an optimization of surface material and geometric parameters using a combination of simulated annealing and steepest descent techniques. Visualization tools extract and present the simulated sound field for points sampled in space and time. The user manipulates the visualizations to create an intuitive expression of acoustic design goals. We achieve interactive rates for surface material modifications by preprocessing the geometric component of the simulation, and accelerate geometric modifications to the auditorium by trading accuracy for speed through a number of interactive controls. We describe an interactive system that allows flexible input and display of the solution and report results for several performance spaces.