Measuring room response using loudspeakers requires a consideration of their acoustic radiation pattern, position in each space, effective bandwidth, and dynamic range. Musical instruments produce sound output that varies considerably in directivity and complexity of room excitation. Groups of instruments and voices activate multiple room responses simultaneously from different locations. Therefore, the resulting audible outcome in a space is a spatial superposition of multiple staggered room responses developing in time, frequency, and amplitude. In a multi-year campaign measuring different indoor and outdoor spaces, impulse response experiments included room excitation by diverse electroacoustic sources built from single and multiple transducers setup to represent musical sources. An examination of the results shows that aural characteristics of rendered virtual rooms differ depending on the source excitation used. Utility of Spatial Room Impulse Responses aiming to elicit a sense of presence in an enclosure depends on choosing SRIRs that complement the direct sound of a musical source. Examples will be shown. Convolution processing using SRIRs offers the most effective perceptual transformation of sound superior to other techniques as it processes sound simultaneously in all domains: spatial, timbral, dynamic, and temporal.
Wieslaw Woszczyk (Wed,) studied this question.