A basic study on presentation of improvement effect of sound environments by use of computational simulation

The purpose of this study is to propose a method of presenting information so that architectural designers who do not specialize in architectural acoustics can easily understand the problems of the sound environment. This paper focuses on presenting the effects of the sound absorbing material using the time domain finite element method (TDFEM) as a computational simulation method. First, the sound fields of different room shapes and sound absorption boundaries are analyzed using TDFEM, and the changes between the sound fields are confirmed by room acoustic parameters at each sound receiving point. Next, visualization and auralization of those sound fields are attempted. The visualization allowed for a detailed capture of changes in sound pressure distribution due to differences in room boundary conditions. As for auralization, subjective differences in sound fields with different boundary conditions were confirmed using the paired comparison method.