Acoustic modeling using the digital waveguide mesh

The digital waveguide mesh has been an active area of music acoustics research for over ten years. Although founded in 1-D digital waveguide modeling, the principles on which it is based are not new to researchers grounded in numerical simulation, FDTD methods, electromagnetic simulation, etc. This article has attempted to provide a considerable review of how the DWM has been applied to acoustic modeling and sound synthesis problems, including new 2-D object synthesis and an overview of recent research activities in articulatory vocal tract modeling, RIR synthesis, and reverberation simulation. The extensive, although not by any means exhaustive, list of references indicates that though the DWM may have parallels in other disciplines, it still offers something new in the field of acoustic simulation and sound synth

FDTD/K-DWM simulation of 3D room acoustics on general purpose graphics hardware using compute unified device architecture (CUDA)

The growing demand for reliable prediction of sound fields in rooms have resulted in adaptation of various approaches for physical modeling, including the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and the Digital Waveguide Mesh (DWM). Whilst considered versatile and attractive methods, they suffer from dispersion errors that increase with frequency and vary with direction of propagation, thus imposing a high frequency calculation limit. Attempts have been made to reduce such errors by considering different mesh topologies, by spatial interpolation, or by simply oversampling the grid. As the latter approach is computationally expensive, its application to three-dimensional problems has often been avoided. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the FDTD on general purpose graphics hardware, allowing for high sampling rates whilst maintaining reasonable calculation times. Dispersion errors are consequently reduced and the high frequency limit is increased. A range of graphics processors are evaluated and compared with traditional CPUs in terms of accuracy, calculation time and memory requirements

Contributions to discrete-time methods for room acoustic simulation

The sound field distribution in a room is the consequence of the acoustic properties of radiating sources and the position, geometry and absorbing characteristics of the surrounding boundaries in an enclosure (boundary conditions). Despite there existing a consolidated acoustic wave theory, it is very difficult, nearly impossible, to find an analytical expression of the sound variables distribution in a real room, as a function of time and position. This scenario represents as an inhomogeneous boundary value problem, where the complexity of source properties and boundary conditions make that problem extremely hard to solve. Room acoustic simulation, as treated in this thesis, comprises the algebraical approach to solve the wave equation, and the way to define the boundary conditions and source modeling of the scenario under analysis. Numerical methods provide accurate algorithms for this purpose and among the different possibilities, the use of discrete-time methods arises as a suitable solution for solving those partial differential equations, particularized by some specific constrains. Together with the constant growth of computer power, those methods are increasing their suitability for room acoustic simulation. However, there exists an important lack of accuracy in the definition of some of these conditions so far: current frequency-dependent boundary conditions do not comply with any physical model, and directive sources in discrete-time methods have been hardly treated. This thesis discusses about the current state-of-the-art of the boundary conditions and source modeling in discrete-time methods for room acoustic simulation, and it contributes some algorithms to enhance boundary condition formulation, in a locally reacting impedance sense, and source modelling in terms of directive sources under a defined radiation pattern. These algorithms have been particularized to some discrete-time methods such as the Finite Difference Time Domain and the Digital Waveguide Mesh.Escolano Carrasco, J. (2008). Contributions to discrete-time methods for room acoustic simulation [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/8309Palanci

Scattering evaluation of equivalent surface impedances of acoustic metamaterials in large FDTD volumes using RLC circuit modelling

Most simulations involving metamaterials often require complex physics to be solved through refined meshing grids. However, it can prove challenging to simulate the effect of local physical conditions created by said metamaterials into much wider computing sceneries due to the increased meshing load. We thus present in this work a framework for simulating complex structures with detailed geometries, such as metamaterials, into large Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) computing environments by reducing them to their equivalent surface impedance represented by a parallel-series RLC circuit. This reduction helps to simplify the physics involved as well as drastically reducing the meshing load of the model and the implicit calculation time. Here, an emphasis is made on scattering comparisons between an acoustic metamaterial and its equivalent surface impedance through analytical and numerical methods. Additionally, the problem of fitting RLC parameters to complex impedance data obtained from transfer matrix models is herein solved using a novel approach based on zero crossings of admittance phase derivatives. Despite the simplification process, the proposed framework achieves good overall results with respect to the original acoustic scatterer while ensuring relatively short simulation times over a vast range of frequencies