Towards a community hub for open-source room acoustics software

Open-source software plays an important role in the advancement of the development, intercomparison, and accessibility of novel and improved room acoustics simulation methods.Although the amount of open-source software in room acoustics has increased over the years, it usually remains less well-maintained and less userfriendly than their proprietary counterparts.Typically, open-source room acoustics simulation software exists as code repositories rather than ready-to-use applications and, therefore, requires technical know-how to be built into usable software.In this work, the Community Hub for Open-source Room Acoustics Software (CHORAS) is presented: a web-based user interface that provides an open-source community platform for room acoustic simulation methods.This platform acts as the front-end for back-end software that can be developed remotely.In this way, any researcher and/or institute can contribute to the platform by integrating their simulation software into the back-end of the application.Currently, users can select the diffusion equation (DE) and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to perform room acoustic simulations.Multiple simulations can be run consecutively, allowing for comparative analysis of results.A preliminary user evaluation indicates that CHORAS is intuitive to use, but improvements can be made.