Paper ICA2016-843
Transcription
Paper ICA2016-843
AA - Architectural Acoustics - Room and Building Acoustics: Paper ICA2016-843 Room acoustic experiments inside the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria Industrial College: A case study with low-cost instrumentation Jean Carlo Bernardi(a) , Bruno G. Knebel(b) , Bernardo H. Pereira Murta(c) , William D’A. Fonseca(d) , Paulo H. Mareze(e) , Eric Brandão(f) (a - f) Federal University of Santa Maria, Acoustical Engineering, Santa Maria, RS, Brazil, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: When studying Room Acoustics, simulations simply are not enough to get the whole picture of the subject. It is important to notice that, measurements on site are also a vital part of the learning process, since it allows the estimation of relevant information concerning the rooms’ acoustic functional efficiency. Later, this information can be used to evaluate acoustic parameters that will play an important role in the acoustic quality for the room. It is very important for students to get experience with rooms acoustic measurements. Nevertheless, it cannot always be carried out easily. Among several reasons, one is the high price of the professional acoustic equipment needed to properly do so. Facing this problem, this work aims to present a case study using lowcost equipment as an alternative method to grant more learning freedom for the students. The case study takes place at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria’s Technical Industrial College Auditorium, Brazil, where the students performed several binaural measurements to evaluate the Auditorium’s performance related to speech and music. Keywords: room acoustics, instrumentation, impulse response, low-cost, experiments. Room acoustic experiments inside the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria Industrial College: A case study with low-cost instrumentation 1 Introduction Over the recent years the use of simulations has dramatically increased in every field of science, thus, room acoustics is no exception. Every year, algorithms have become more sophisticated and improvements on computer processing power are developed. Hence, more complex simulations can be processed in less time, yielding more accurate results than ever before. The pros of using simulation are not a mystery as well; it is possible to obtain several acoustical parameters through it, for example, Reverberation Time (RT), Early Decay Time (EDT), among more specific ones, such as D50 or C80 , for instance [1]. Such parameters are of great importance in determining the acoustic quality of a room [2]. Having all this in mind, it becomes convenient to make use of simulations as the main tool to teach room acoustics, however, while it holds great importance, simulations simply are not enough to get the whole picture of the subject. On place measurements are time-consuming activities since loads of requirements and plans are needed to be resolved beforehand to optimize time spent in room and logistics of equipment management and properly installation. In addition, one of the most challenging parts when handling a relatively large student class is guaranteeing the proper use of the equipment in order to keep it safe avoiding damage. Nonetheless, measurements on site are also a vital part of the learning process allowing the students a more vivid experience on how the theory of room acoustics was built and how it works. Facing these challenges the use of low-cost instrumentation can have a significant impact on the approach taken by a professor when teaching room acoustics. More freedom for both students and the professor can be achieved, allowing measurements to take place without the risk of damaging expensive equipment. Furthermore, this allows several measurements to be taken by distinct students in different rooms simultaneously. Aiming to provide a solution for the challenge, the present work makes use of low-cost instrumentation to perform room acoustic measurements at a lecture hall, the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria Industrial College, in Brazil. The measurements were acquired by a MATLABcontrolled USB external soundcard as both monaural and binaural impulse responses, the latter through the use of a customized head-torso simulator with electret microphones. These impulse responses were later post processed using the ITA-Toolbox1 and self-written scripts. The results obtained were compared to different measurement positions and the acoustic quality of the lecture hall was evaluated accordingly to these parameters. The case study measurements were carried out by a group of three senior undergraduate students of Acoustical Engineering through the use of both omnidirectional sources as well as the lecture hall sound reinforcement system. 1 Free MATLAB toolbox developed at the Institute of Technical Acoustics at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) for acoustic measurements and signal processing. 2 2 Object of study: Industrial College Auditorium This section presents a description of the Industrial College Auditorium, where measurements took place. Originally built in 1960, the auditorium has gone through several refurbishments and improvements untill this day. The auditorium has a total capacity of 106 persons in the audience in addition to four seats for the stage. The auditorium plan is presented in Figure 1 to clarify the audience distribution and its size. Figure 1: Industrial College Auditorium’s Plan. The auditorium’s main use is for seminars, lectures and conferences, therefore, requiring a good acoustic quality for speech. Despite that, there is no element of acoustic treatment in the auditorium, the seats are heavily padded chairs and the floor is light carpet covered by a rubber material on the passageways. The walls are made of concrete, finished with cement and painted. The ceiling is made of regular gypsum boards. Auditorium’s height, floor to ceiling, is considered low for such an environment, reaching a maximum of 3 meters at the front floor, just before the stage, and lowering to a minimum of 2.25 meters at the last row. The estimated room’s volume is, approximately, 300 m3 . 3 Equipment The equipment used for the measurements is an important feature of this paper. Aiming to fulfill the low-cost equipment premise proposed for such an activity, the students carried out the measurements with the following set of equipment: • Data acquisition system: – M-Audio Ultra Track Pro (commercial USB eternal soundcard); 3 • Sources of sound: – Auditorium’s Sound System (P.A.): four SKP Pro Audio Speakers; – Omnidirectional source to validate measurements; • Microphones: – Two Sennheiser type KE4 [3]; – One Panasonic type WM61 [4]; • Measurement control and post-processing: – Notebook controlling acquisition system through ITA-Toolbox via MATLAB Student version. To provide a better understanding of the whole system working together a flowchart of the connections and equipment setup is shown at Figure 2. It is to be noted that the pair of KE4 microphones were positioned in the earplugs of a dummy head in order to impose a Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) to the binaural measurements [5, 6]. The WM61 microphone was placed in the position of the center of the head with the head absent for the single channel measurements. To make it possible, the dummy head and the WM61 were positioned in different seats at each measurement chain, the whole measurement planning will be addressed with more details in Section 4. Absolute pressure levels can also be achieved with this system. In this case, acoustical and voltage calibrators must be included in the instrumentation list [7]. Figure 2: Flowchart presenting the connections of the measurement setup. 4 4 Measurement Plan The studied auditorium is used daily for lectures and seminars. Thus, students were needed to work during the night shift and spend as less time as possible inside it during the measurements (there was also a concern about the background noise and vibration). The complete measurement was planned beforehand and all the logistics were pre-organized in order to measure 5 positions for each monaural and binaural measurements, using two different sound sources (conventional omnidirectional and room’s existing P.A.) as fast as possible. Measurements positions were selected to provide a relatively good representation of the sound field in the auditorium. The chosen positions were: first and last row, near the sidewalls as well as in the center of the room, as depicted in Figure 3. The idea is to cover variations in the sound field that the audience may experiment. Figure 3: Measurement map with the five seats, covering different sound field scenarios. Due to the time constraints previously mentioned, the measurement logistic was carefully planned in advance, variables such as cable lengths, measurement positions, number of measurements, data storage requirements and side equipment as measuring tape, thermometer and barometer, were all taken into the account. The planning allowed the students to optimize the measurement process, every step was planned in a Test Matrix. Thus, on site, there was almost no decision left to be taken, avoiding inconvenient situations and/or surprises. From previous experience, the students have estimated that this previous planning has saved half of the time that it would be spent without the Test Matrix developed. To achieve this optimal time, both monoaural and binaural measurements were carried out simultaneously in different positions. It was needed a total of 5 batch measurements to acquire all the data. 4.1 Signal processing After the measurements, the acquired data needs to be processed in order to be correlated with relevant acoustic parameters. This signal processing was carried out using scripts via MATLAB developed by the students. The data was batch processed in order to obtain the Impulse Responses (IR) and Binaural Room Impulse Responses (BRIR), following the convolution and signal processing theories. 5 Once the IR relative to each microphone at each position is obtained, the reverberation time and other parameters are estimated employing ITA-Toolbox processing tools together with the developed scripts. The analysis presented throughout this work is limited to detect some characteristics of the room, such as its first resonant modes in the frequency domain analysis, mean reverberation time for each position and the Early Decay Time (EDT). 5 Results The results are presented in 3 parts. The first one shows the frequency response of the room, comparing it to the room’s modes (see Figure 4). The second analysis shows the reverberation times all positions measured with both sources (Section 5.2). Finally, the EDT is estimated for 3 positions (see Figure 8). 5.1 Frequency domain analysis - Room An analysis of the impulse response in the frequency domain (or Frequency Response Function, FRF) is carried out. The measured data with the omnidirectional source and the microphone at the center of the head is compared to the estimated modal distribution of the room, per Figure 4. There are small variations concerning the modes frequency and FRF peaks. However, this error may be related to the simplification of modal analysis. The auditorium was approached by a rectangular room with dimensions (7.78 x 13.92 x 3.00) m, ignoring, therefore, the floor height variation. Nevertheless, the modal distribution estimation can be considered valid except for the small variations. Modal distribution compared to the FRF position 1 - Omni source - Microphone on center of the head 1.0 0.9 normalized FRF Room modes 0.8 Magnitude [-] 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 30 40 50 60 70 Frequency [Hz] Figure 4: Modal distribution compared to the normalized FRF at Position 1 (by using the omnidirectional source and the microphone at the center of the head). 6 5.2 Reverberation Time (RT) Figures 5 and 6 shows the results for the reverberation time in third octave bands, for all positions and sources described in the measurement map shown in Figure 3, as well as the average reverberation time. Error bars represent the standard deviation of the repetitions. In Figure 5 it is possible to observe that in one position for the bands 400 Hz and 630 Hz the reverberation time measured is clearly over-estimated. Therefore, those values were excluded in the averaging process of the reverberation time for the P.A. system. Reverberation time - Average of 5 positions - P.A. system source 3.0 Position 1 Position 2 Position 3 Position 4 Position 5 Average RT Reverberation time [s] 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 100 160 250 400 630 1000 1600 2500 4000 6300 10000 Frequency [Hz] Figure 5: Reverberation time in third octave bands relative to the measurement positions using the omnidirectional microphone with the P.A. (as sound source). Reverberation time - Average of 5 positions - Omni source 3.0 Position 1 Position 2 Position 3 Position 4 Position 5 Average RT Reverberation time [s] 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 100 160 250 400 630 1000 1600 2500 4000 6300 10000 Frequency [Hz] Figure 6: Reverberation time in third octave bands relative to the measurement positions using the omnidirectional microphone with the omnidirectional source. 7 A comparison of the reverberation time measured with the two sound sources is shown in Figure 7. It is possible to perceive good accordance between the measured values. This reinforces the hypothesis that the electroacoustic P.A. system installed in the room is adequate for its applications. It amplifies speech exciting the room (in the range of frequencies between 200 Hz and 10 kHz) similarly to the omnidirectional sound source (the RT nearly flat, about 0.6 s). RT by position - Microphone on center of the head Time [s] 3.6 3.0 2.4 1.8 1.2 0.6 0.0 100 160 250 400 630 1000 1600 2500 4000 10000 P.A. Omni Frequency [Hz] Figure 7: Comparison betwen the calculated TR in third octave bands using as sound source the P.A. system and the B&K dodecahedron (averaging between positions). According to Long [8], rooms that the main objective is to use for speech should have a flat reverberation time at all frequencies. The analyzed room meets the RT requirements specified by the Brazilian standard NBR 12179 [9]. Since its estimated volume is approximately 300 m3 , the RT is close to the recommended by Long for environments intended to speak with this volume, approximately 0.5 seconds. Furthermore, the room have shown a nearly flat reverberation time up above the band 250 Hz. The EDT is a parameter related to the intelligibility in a room [1]. Thus, it is important that this parameter does not present significant variations among different seats. Figure 8 depicts the mean EDT and its standard deviation over the three repeats for three distinct positions. 8 EDT - Average of 3 positions - P.A. system source 3.0 Position 2 Position 3 Position 4 2.5 EDT [s] 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 160 250 400 630 1000 1600 2500 4000 6300 10000 Frequency [Hz] Figure 8: Objective parameter EDT, measured for 3 positions with the P.A. system. 6 Conclusion From the student’s perspective, the activities carried out from planning to post-processing comprehends an important role in the final preparation aiming the inclusion in the job market. Besides applying the room acoustics theory and getting experience in handling measurement equipment and in post-processing, other skills such as logistic management, team work and optimization of time were improved after the activities. The results of reverberation times were regarded consistent, given the Long [8] recommendations for the omnidirectional and P.A. sound sources (for all measurement positions). Moreover, small variations of the EDT along the seats reinforces the good quality of the studied auditorium. The students were also able to apply auralization techniques using the BRIRs to listen at the different seats. Although no subjective study was applied, the experience to process such signals and the understanding of the different conditions of each BRIR have contributed to the overall development of practical knowledge in room acoustics. Acknowledgements Data acquisition and also some analysis and post processing have been carried out by using the ITA-Toolbox for MATLAB. It is developed by the Institute of Technical Acoustics at RWTH Aachen University [7] (available at www.ita-toolbox.org). References [1] Eric Brandão. Acústica de salas: projeto e modelagem. Blucher, Brasil, Jun. 2016. 9 [2] H. Kuttruff. Room Acoustics. CRC Press, 5 edition, Jun. 2009. [3] Martin Guski. Influences of external error sources on measurements of room acoustic parameters. PhD thesis, RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany, 2015. [4] William D’A. Fonseca. Development and Application of an Acoustic Imaging System using Beamforming Technique for Moving Sources (original: Desenvolvimento e Aplicação de Sistema para Obtenção de Imagens Acústicas pelo Método do Beamforming para Fontes em Movimento). Master’s thesis, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil, Feb. 2009. [5] Michael Vorländer. Auralization: Fundamentals of Acoustics, Modelling, Simulation, Algorithms and Acoustic Virtual Reality. Springer, Berlin, Germany, 2007. [6] Henrik Møller. Fundamentals of binaural technology. Applied Acoustics, 36(3):171 – 218, 1992. [7] Pascal Dietrich, Bruno Masiero, Martin Pollow, Roman Scharrer, and M Muller-Trapet. Matlab toolbox for the comprehension of acoustic measurement and signal processing. Fortschritte der Akustik–DAGA, Berlin, 2010. [8] Marshall Long. Architectural acoustics. Elsevier, 2005. [9] ABNT Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. NBR 12179 - 1992 - Tratamento acústico em recintos fechados, Abril 1992. 10