In urban acoustic environments, sound propagation is heavily influenced by obstacles that block the direct line-of-sight, making diffraction a crucial mechanism for plausible acoustic simulations. While the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) resolves the unnatural discontinuities present in standard Geometric Acoustics (GA), the computational cost increases exponentially with each additional diffraction order. This thesis investigates […]

The balance between spectral resolution and physical accuracy is a central aspect for the design of real time path based auralization systems. The main problem is that reducing frequency resolution lowers processing costs but can significantly change the spectral representation of propagation effects. To investigate this, a systematic study of air attenuation, reflection and diffraction […]

The combination of modern signal processing and loudspeaker development enables sound reproduction close to reality. Even though the loudspeaker system exhibits most distortions in terms of amplitude and phase response, those nonlinear responses are close to or even below the perceptual threshold. Yet, the audibility of group delay is still a topic of debate, although […]