Software for Acoustic Rendering

SLAB is a software system that can be run on a personal computer to simulate an acoustic environment in real time. SLAB was developed to enable computational experimentation in which one can exert low-level control over a variety of signalprocessing parameters, related to spatialization, for conducting psycho- acoustic studies. Among the parameters that can be manipulated are the number and position of reflections, the fidelity (that is, the number of taps in finite-impulse-response filters), the system latency, and the update rate of the filters. Another goal in the development of SLAB was to provide an inexpensive means of dynamic synthesis of virtual audio over headphones, without need for specialpurpose signal-processing hardware. SLAB has a modular, object-oriented design that affords the flexibility and extensibility needed to accommodate a variety of computational experiments and signal-flow structures. SLAB’s spatial renderer has a fixed signal-flow architecture corresponding to a set of parallel signal paths from each source to a listener. This fixed architecture can be regarded as a compromise that optimizes efficiency at the expense of complete flexibility. Such a compromise is necessary, given the design goal of enabling computational psychoacoustic experimentation on inexpensive personal computers.