Accounting for listening level in the prediction of reverberance using early decay time

Reverberance, which is an auditory attribute describing the extent to which a room or system is reverberant, is conventionally estimated using early decay time (similar to reverberation time). In a series of recent studies, the authors have shown that reverberance is better estimated using loudness decay parameters, i.e., parameters derived from the decay function of a room impulse response analysed using an objective time-varying loudness model. This approach is based on the notion that the experience of sound decaying in a room is an experience of loudness decay. One reason for the success of this approach is that the loudness decay rate depends on listening level, and this dependency corresponds to subjective experimental data on reverberance. However, loudness-based analysis is neither simple nor computationally efficient, and so this paper proposes a simplified approach to reverberance estimation, using listening level to modify early decay time or reverberation time values