Decay Envelope Manipulation of Room Impulse Responses: Techniques for Auralization and Sonification

Room impulse responses (RIRs) are very commonly used to represent the acoustic response of rooms for the derivation of acoustical parameters and for auralization. This paper presents a set of signal processing techniques that can be used to enhance the usefulness of recorded RIRs for convolution-based room simulations (which could be classed as a type of auralization), which include using the noise floor to extend the decay, and manipulating the RIR to represent arbitrarily different yet plausible room conditions. The paper also considers how the manipulation of the decay slope can be used to make other features of RIRs more audible, which could have applications in RIR sonification.