Perceptually optimized room-in-room sound reproduction with spatially distributed loudspeakers

In sound reproduction it is desired to reproduce a recording of an instrument made in a specific room (e.g. a church or concert hall) in a playback room such that the listener has a plausible and authentic impression of the instrument including the room acoustical properties of the recording room. For this purpose a new method is presented that separately optimizes the direct sound field and recreates a reverberant sound field in the playback room that matches that of the recording room. This approach optimizes monaural cues related to coloration and the interaural cross correlation (IACC), responsible for listener envelopment, in both rooms based on an artificial head placed at the listener’s positions. The cues are adjusted using an auditorily motivated gammatone analysissynthesis filterbank. A MUSHRA listening test revealed that the proposed method is able to recreate the perceived room acoustics of the recording room in an accurate way.