Development of an Efficient Binaural Simulation for the Analysis of Structural Acoustic Data

Applying binaural simulation techniques to structural acoustic data can be very computationally intensive as the number of discrete noise sources can be very large. Typically, Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are used to individually filter the signals from each of the sources in the acoustic field. Therefore, creating a binaural simulation implies the use of potentially hundreds of real time filters. This paper details two methods of reducing the number of real-time computations required by: (i) using the singular value decomposition (SVD) to reduce the complexity of the HRTFs by breaking them into dominant singular values and vectors and (ii) by using equivalent source reduction (ESR) to reduce the number of sources to be analyzed in real-time by replacing sources on the scale of a structural wavelength with sources on the scale of an acoustic wavelength. The ESR and SVD reduction methods can be combined to provide an estimated computation time reduction of 99.4% for the structural acoustic data tested. In addition, preliminary tests have shown that there is a 97% correlation between the results of the combined reduction methods and the results found with the current binaural simulation techniques