Reverberation reduction in a room for multiple positions

Reverberation in a room occurs when the direct path sound from a sound source undergoes multiple reflections from the walls of the room before reaching the listener. An impulse response of the room can be measured called the room impulse response (RIR) which captures the effects of the room. This can be represented digitally on a computer. A filter is designed to cancel the effects of the room using the information in the room impulse response. This filter is called an equalization filter and is usually placed between the source signal and loudspeaker to perform the equalization. The RIR changes for varying source and listener locations, hence an equalization filter designed for one RIR will not perform equalization for multiple positions. This thesis explores methods to perform equalization for multiple positions. One of the simplest methods is spatial averaging equalization, which was used to perform the equalization for multiple positions. Equalizing RIR is only concerned about trying to flatten the frequency spectrum and stabilizing the inverse RIR by looking at its minimum-phase component. Other methods are explored which consider the masking effects of the human auditory system which relates to the perception of sound by the human ear. One such method is impulse response shortening/reshaping which emphasizes the direct path component in the RIR relative to the rest of the components using p-norm and infinity-norm optimization which is an iterative algorithm. This concept is extended for performing reshaping on RIR for multiple positions using the idea in spatial averaging equalization by using RIR\u27s measure for different positions --Abstract, page iii