TLM modelling for room acoustics
Résumé
Time-domain methods constitute an attractive alternative to classical approaches like energetic or statistical methods for room acoustics applications. Indeed, their ability to fully and precisely describe spatial and time sound evolution in complex 3D scenes is of significant interest. Moreover, such approaches allow considering intrinsically the virtual reality through the soundscapes auralization due to their temporal nature. As an example, the Transmission Line Matrix (TLM) method stands for an interesting approach. Nowadays, the main limits of time-domain methods still remain the computational time and overall the memory space. Nevertheless, the first limitation can be partly overpass by taking benefit from recent computing language developments as the OpenCL framework, combined with powerful multiple cores processors such as graphics processing units. In addition, the cache memory requirements can be restricted by optimizing the matrix storage. An OpenCL TLM algorithm and a specific voxelization tool have been designed in order to run massively parallel computations on personal computers. A few room acoustics applications are presented and the results are compared with analytic solutions and energetic methods predictions.