Waveguide-based Room Acoustics through Graphics Hardware

The modelling of room acoustics remains a difficult and computationally expensive task. Two main techniques ex-ist, one focusing on the real physical- wave-oriented-sound propagation, while the other approximates sound waves using rays and ray-tracing techniques. One of the most popular wave-based technique are waveguide meshes, which simulate the propagation of sound using time do-main difference models. In this paper we discuss a realtime implementation of the waveguide technique using fragment shaders and computer graphics hardware. Graphics hardware is well suited for parallel implementations and thus able to speed-up the computation. Additionally, we discuss optimal sam-pling on hexagonal grids to further increase the computa-tional efficiency. We compare both implementations and discuss the results achieved.