The design and development of Godot: A system for computer‐aided room acoustics modeling and simulation

Godot is a software system for computer‐aided room acoustics design and simulation. It is able to generate an audible simulation of arbitrarily directional sound sources in arbitrarily shaped rooms, incorporating diffraction effects. This paper reviews the design of the system. A polyhedral representation is used to model the room under consideration. Sound beams, defined by their axis directions and directivity factors, are traced as they traverse the room, and their “hits” upon a receiver position are noted. A perspective projection from the image of the source onto a “window” perpendicular to the beam axis is used to determine which edges of the room fall within a beam and hence can generate diffracted waves. The power transfer function of each path from source to receiver is used to derive the autocorrelation coefficients associated with the path, and linear least‐squares prediction is used to determine the coefficients of an autoregressive digital filter which will match the frequency response of the path. When driven by arbitrary digitized program material, the parallel channels of the system, representing the paths to the receiver, will give an audible simulation of the conditions being considered.