ARCHITECTS aiming to create rooms with crowd-pleasing acoustics could soon rely on a pair of virtual ears to sound out their designs.
The software-based ears are the brainchild of at Cardiff University in the UK, and colleagues, who think they can be used to transform blueprints into 鈥渟ound maps鈥� which show how discernible speech would be, compared with background noise, at various positions in a room.
Their virtual ears address a particular acoustic problem: singling out a voice against background babble. Culling鈥檚 system models how sound should travel in a room, then it works out how two competing sources would be perceived at a range of locations around the room.
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The team created models of rooms and assumed their virtual ears would be 1.5 metres above the floor 鈥� to simulate human ears. It was then used to predict whether someone standing at a given location would be audible above a noise source at a third location 鈥� a proxy for ambient chatter. The results tally closely with those obtained when human volunteers were asked to assess audibility in test environments (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, ).
