A note on the proper frequency resolution for the room transfer function in the phased beam tracing method

In the simulation of acoustic response of a room, one cannot satisfactorily estimate the transfer function or the impulse response with a sparse frequency resolution. We have studied about the frequency resolution for a satisfactory estimation of room transfer function or the reverberation time using the phased beam tracing method. In order to investigate what happens with the frequency resolution, a number of frequency resolution (0.01-1 Hz), which are usually employed in the numerical analysis, was tested for a room model. It was found that the total accumulated phase in a transfer function and the late part of an impulse response of a room are influenced by the frequency resolution. Main reason for the difference is the correct detection of non-minimum phase zeros, depending on the frequency resolution. A criterion for a proper frequency resolution was suggested by considering the modal density of three-dimensional space. When a sparse dataset was initially given, we showed that cubic spline interpolation can be used to enhance the precision of detection for non-minimum phase zeros. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.