Bring a Concert Home

Inverse filtering of rooms to improve their frequency response or reverberation time is a well-researched topic in acoustical signal processing. With the aim of giving music lovers the experience of a concert hall in their own homes, we describe a system that employs signal processing techniques, including inverse filtering, to accurately reproduce concert hall acoustics in a home listening space. First, binaural impulse responses were measured at a few chosen seating positions in the concert hall. Next, the listening location along with its loudspeaker configuration is acoustically characterized and inverse filtered using MINT and Cross-talk Cancellation algorithms to produce a flat-frequency response. We observed that speech and music, after our inverse filtering method showed near-anechoic qualities which allowed us to subsequently impress the acoustical response of a wide range of concert halls upon the original audio. A demonstration will be provided using 4 loudspeakers for a quadraphonic sound reproduction at the listening area. In continuing work, to produce a sufficiently wide listening area, we are combining head tracking with adaptive inverse filtering to adjust to the listeners’ movements.