Improving Binaural Simulation of Structural Acoustics

The proposed innovation is an implementation of an improved, more efficient method for processing individual Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) data during the process of rendering audio in a structural acoustic simulated environment. Binaural or 3D-simulated audio has been identified as a useful method for analyzing acoustic and vibro-acoustic data. The highest quality audio simulation requires the processing of HRTF data to create the most accurate 3D audio rendering; however, such processing requires an extensive amount of CPU cycles and is one of the biggest limiting factors of the complexity of the audio simulation. By significantly improving the efficiency of HRTF processing, through such techniques as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Equivalent Source Reduction (ESR), the complexity of the structure being acoustically modeled can be increased. In fact, the capacity of the audio rendering engine can be increased to the point where not only single point audio sources can be modeled, but surface-defined audio sources can be defined, using an array of single-point sources. Such surface-defined audio sources make the audio simulation of vibro-acoustic systems feasible. Such a system will act as an effective tool for assessing the noise characteristics and ?sound quality? of structural acoustic prototypes.