A Dataset for Location- and Direction-Dependent Reverberation Analysis

Abstract

Measuring room impulse responses (RIRs) is fundamental to sound reproduction and acoustical research. For instance, these measurements play an essential role in building digital twins in virtual reality to preserve their cultural heritage. For sound reproduction, RIRs can be used directly through convolution, or a more complex timefrequency domain analysis may be used to characterize a parametric method. Measuring RIRs using microphone arrays, such as a spherical microphone array, is necessary to extend this reproduction to the spatial domain. Recent work has shown that reverberant sound fields have perceptually salient position-and direction-dependent characteristics which should be considered in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) sound reproduction. However, related psychoacoustics and signal processing research require complex datasets to measure to better understand these characteristics. In this article, we present an experiment carried out in the main auditorium of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet in Helsinki, where we measured spatial RIRs from the perspective of ninety-seven individual seats. We analyze key characteristics of the resulting anisotropic and inhomogeneous sound field using energy-based analysis methods and the dataset is shared publicly to allow for further research in this field, such as multi-slope decay analysis and 6DoF auralization.