Simulating Early Sound Reflections by Beam Tracing

by
Ben Newton

Advised by
John Hollerbach

When simulating sound in a virtual environment, a listener's perception is affected by the precise timing, intensity and direction of early reflections. However, in most real-time sound simulation systems these early reflections are not modeled accurately. The beam tracing method allows for accurate, real-time generation of sound paths through the geometry of an environment. This work describes an implementation of the beam tracing method, and an experiment performed using it. The implementation consists of four stages: spatial partitioning, beam tracing, path generation, and auralization. Each stage of the implementation is discussed in detail, and the contributions of this work are explained. An experiment was performed to determine how the maximum order of reflection effects a users ability to determine which of two rooms is larger. The results of this experiment are presented and analyzed.