A Fast Forest Reverberator Using Single Scattering Cylinders

Simulating forest acoustics has important applications for rendering forest sound scenes in mixed and virtual reality, developing wildlife monitoring systems that use microphone arrays distributed in a forest, or as an artistic effect. Previously proposed methods for forest impulse response (IR) synthesis are limited to small or sparse forests because of their cubic asymptotic complexity with respect to the number of trees. Here we propose a simple and efficient parametric forest IR generation algorithm that relies on a multitude of single scattering cylinders to approximate scattering caused by tree trunks. The proposed method was compared to measured forest IRs in terms of the IR echo density, energy decay, reverberation time (T60), and clarity (C50). Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm generates forest reverb with acoustic characteristics similar to real forest IRs at a low computational cost.