Acoustical Engineering
Mallari, Jose Emmanuel P. ECE - 4
#
School of Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering, Mapua Institute of Technology
Muralla St., Intramuros, Manila, Metro Manila, Philippines
Jose.Emmanuel.Mallari@gmail.com
Abstractthe paper presents a possible practical
application of funded research into the field of acoustical
engineering. Focusing on the application of room
acoustics in engineering and beyond.
KeywordsAcoustical engineering Room acoustics
I. INTRODUCTION
Room acoustics is a science dealing with the
acoustical characteristics of a room or an enclosed
space. Its applications as of now focus on the
determination of the most optimal placement of
speakers for maximum efficiency or removing all echo
and reverberation for sound absorption. In describing
room acoustics we can define it as the science of how
sound waves behave in a particular room or, in general,
an enclosed space.
Room acoustics define four zones of preference in
determining how the sound waves react. The first zone
in room acoustics is characterized by the frequency at
which the wavelength is below the length of twice the
longest length of the room. In this zone of frequency
sound behaves to changes much like changes in static
air pressure. The second zone, above that of the first, is
approximately up to 11,250 (RT60/V)1/2 and
2000(RT60/V)1/2 at which point the volumes are
measure in cubic feet to cubic meters. At this zone
wavelengths are comparable to room dimensions and
room resonance is considered. The third zone extends 2
octaves and is a transition into the fourth zone; where
sound behave like rays of light bouncing around.
Researches on room acoustics range from studies
into the nature of materials used in sound dampening,
speech separation techniques and room scale
positioning systems. These researches all rely on the
understanding of how sound waves travel around in a
room and how well materials reflect or absorb the
sound waves. Most of the research into the prioritizes
this idea and focuses on analytical methods and
computer simulation algorithms to define the
characteristics of a room beyond that of a physical
method.
One of the most interesting ideas floated around is
that of room reconstruction using sound. With a mobile
node alongside a co-located loudspeaker and
microphone room scale reconstruction has been
studied.
II. PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Research has been performed on the idea of
room scale reconstruction using a variety of means,
form light, sound and or radio waves. We will focus on
the works performed using the idea of sound waves to
perform room reconstruction of 2-D geometries.
The work done by Fangron peng et al. focused
on the recovery of the room shape using a single
mobile acoustic sensor. In their work, they used a
single mobile node with co-located loudspeaker and
microphone to determine the arrival times of the first
order echoes and are used for the room reconstruction.
In the study they used the uniqueness of the mapping
between the first-order echoes and the room geometry
was consistently guaranteed except for parallelograms.
In the paper they proposed an algorithmic procedure to
eliminate higher order echoes and retrieve room
geometry [1]. This work is unique in that it uses a
singular module to determine the geometry in
comparison to other works done in the field. In a paper
done by D. Ba, entitled L1 Regularized room
modeling with compact microphone arrays, they
made us of a microphone array system in order to
determine the room geometry. In their work, a multiple
stage single wall impulse response in different angles
were used followed by an l-1 regularized least squares
method to map the measured impulse response to
formulate a 3D shoebox room [2]. The downside being
that the number of walls is known, limiting the
applications of the research.
Another interesting approach taken to retrieve
room geometry throught the use of sound was
performed by Ivan dokmanic, Yue M. Lu and Martin
Vettereli in their paper entitled, Can one hear the
shape of a room: The 2-D polygonal case wherein
they made us a rooms acoustic response or the acoustic
room impulse response (RIR) to determine geometry.
Basing the motivation for the research behind the ide
pose d by M.Kac which simply asks Can you hear
the shape of a drum?, the team behind the paper
proposed the idea that through using the acoustic
response of a room you can formulate an algorithm to
determine the shape. In lieu of previous research done
the team of Vettereli et al. provided in their paper
several numerical calculations to provide insight into
the algorithm concerning 2-D estimations.
III. PROPOSED RESEARCH
In the field of room geometry retrieval, much
work has been done in the analysis of rooms with a
regular geometry, simple room shapes. What I propose
is that using the aforementioned techniques used in
previous researchers, they be applied to cartography.
In particular, in the field of speleology wherein the
accurate representation of a room is a vital factor in
research work, making use of acoustical methods to
determine the room can be lifesaving. Speleology or
spelaeology is the scientific study of cave and orther
karst features. Applying research done into room
geometry retrieval we can simplify the process of cave
survering and allow for a more detailed understanding
of the cave systems that can be found here on earth or
possibly on other planets.
In order to fully accomplish this task we
consider the fact that a combination of RIR and TOA
along multiple microphone arrays might be required in
order to grasp the basic outline of a room. Particularly
we need to consider that in a cave environment the
shape and the room response will behave differently
than that of a room made with concrete or plaster. In a
cave system echo and reverberation will be present and
pose a considerable challenge in determining the shape
of the room.
In order to compensate for the levels of echoes
that are to be expected in a cave system a furthered
refinement to filtering methods can be performed on
higher order echoes. In a paper done by Zhiping Zhan
and Zhiqiang Wu, they propose a method, a parametric
adaptive filter, to cancel echoes based on a normalized
finite impulse response filter, a gain factor and a time
shift factor [3]. Although the method done will require
more calibrations as the paper was designed to cancel
echoes as part of a model to cancel echoes from
loudspeakers.
The work in this field can open up a field of
science that eluded traditional means due to the risk
involved in exploring unknown environments.
IV. REFERENCES
1. F. Peng, T. Wang and B. Chen, "Room shape
reconstruction with a single mobile acoustic
sensor," 2015 IEEE Global Conference on
Signal and Information Processing
(GlobalSIP), Orlando, FL, 2015, pp. 1116-
1120.
2. I. Dokmani, Y. M. Lu and M. Vetterli, "Can
one hear the shape of a room: The 2-D
polygonal case," 2011 IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP), Prague, 2011, pp. 321-
324.
3. Z. Zhang and Z. Wu, "An adaptive filter with
gain and time-shift parameters for echo
cancellation," 2016 10th International
Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language
Processing (ISCSLP), Tianjin, China, 2016,
pp. 1-5.