Common-Slope Modeling of Late Reverberation

The decaying sound field in rooms is typically described by energy decay functions (EDFs). Late reverberation can deviate considerably from the ideal diffuse field, for example, in multiple connected rooms or non-uniform absorption material distributions. This paper proposes the common-slope model of late reverberation. The model describes spatial and directional late reverberation as linear combinations of exponential decays called common slopes. Its fundamental idea is that common slopes have decay times that are invariant across space and direction, while their amplitudes vary across both. We explore different approaches for determining the common slopes for large EDF sets describing different source-receiver configurations of the same environment. Among the presented approaches, the k-means clustering of decay times is the most general. Our evaluation shows that the common-slope model introduces only a small error between the modeled and the true EDF, while being considerably more compact than the traditional multi-exponential model. The amplitude variations of the common slopes yield interpretable room acoustic analyses. The common-slope model has potential applications in all fields relying on late reverberation models, such as source separation, dereverberation, echo cancellation, and parametric spatial audio rendering.