Physically accurate binaural reproductions from broadband wave-based room acoustics simulations, and comparison with measurements

The ability to perform wave-based room acoustics simulations with a listener embedded into the scene can be valuable, for instance, to obtain accurate binaural renderings. Accounting for the listener directly in the simulations however remains challenging due to geometrical constraints, and is also impractical since the orientation is fixed and must be known in advance. We present a broadband wave-based acoustics simulation framework to estimate spatial room impulse responses with high accuracy, where the sound field is simulated with the discontinuous Galerkin method and sampled using an array of receivers designed to operate over a large frequency range. The data is then encoded into spherical harmonics contributions, resulting in a very high-order ambisonics formulation (e.g., up to order 16), which can be combined with free-field head-related transfer functions (HRTF) for binaural reproductions with a physical accuracy. The approach is validated against original binaural room impulse response measurements for different source-receiver configurations; an excellent agreement is found with the simulations.