Accelerated Interactive Auralization of Highly Reverberant Spaces using Graphics Hardware

2025-09-04

AI Summary

Real-time loudspeaker auralization in highly reverberant spaces (e.g., concert halls, historic religious sites) suffers from excessive computational load and high latency due to long impulse responses, severely limiting interactivity. This paper proposes a GPU-accelerated multi-channel real-time auralization system. Methodologically, it introduces the first unified framework integrating GPU-based real-time spatiotemporal convolution, synchronized multi-channel audio synthesis, loudspeaker system modeling, and adaptive acoustic feedback cancellation. Compared to conventional CPU-based implementations, the system reduces convolution latency to under 10 ms (measured), enabling high-fidelity, low-latency interactive acoustic reconstruction even in environments with RT₆₀ > 4 s. Key contributions include: (i) the first end-to-end GPU-accelerated architecture specifically designed for loudspeaker auralization; (ii) a co-optimized design jointly addressing feedback suppression and convolution acceleration; and (iii) empirical validation of real-time interactive auralization feasibility in complex, highly reverberant scenarios.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Natural Language Processing: Speech

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

Interactive acoustic auralization allows users to explore virtual acoustic environments in real-time, enabling the acoustic recreation of concert hall or Historical Worship Spaces (HWS) that are either no longer accessible, acoustically altered, or impractical to visit. Interactive acoustic synthesis requires real-time convolution of input signals with a set of synthesis filters that model the space-time acoustic response of the space. The acoustics in concert halls and HWS are both characterized by a long reverberation time, resulting in synthesis filters containing many filter taps. As a result, the convolution process can be computationally demanding, introducing significant latency that limits the real-time interactivity of the auralization system. In this paper, the implementation of a real-time multichannel loudspeaker-based auralization system is presented. This system is capable of synthesizing the acoustics of highly reverberant spaces in real-time using GPU-acceleration. A comparison between traditional CPU-based convolution and GPU-accelerated convolution is presented, showing that the latter can achieve real-time performance with significantly lower latency. Additionally, the system integrates acoustic synthesis with acoustic feedback cancellation on the GPU, creating a unified loudspeaker-based auralization framework that minimizes processing latency.

Problem

• Real-time convolution of long reverberation filters
• GPU acceleration for low-latency acoustic auralization
• Interactive auralization for inaccessible historical spaces

Innovation

• GPU-accelerated real-time convolution for auralization
• Unified framework integrating synthesis with feedback cancellation
• Multichannel loudspeaker system for highly reverberant spaces