Comparing Open Source Room Acoustics Simulation Tools: Performance and Usability Insights

In previous decades, many studies, including several round robin studies, have been conducted on the validation of room acoustics simulation software for real rooms.However, these earlier studies mainly studied commercial software, did not assess the subjective usability of the software, and the results are less reproducible for several reasons.In recent years, opensource room acoustic simulation tools have increasingly been shared, free to be used and redistributed by anyone subject to the license conditions.These software open the potential to accelerate science and offer opportunities for reproducibility of the results.Open-source tools for room acoustic simulation, however, lack evaluation of their performance and usability.In an effort to promote the usage of open-source acoustic simulation tools, this research presents an approach to compare the performance of open-source simulation software for room acoustics.Furthermore, it intends to be a starting point for a curated performance table of open-source software.Amongst the selected software are wave-based methods, geometrical acoustics methods and machine learning approaches.Simulation results of these software are compared with measurement data from the BRAS database.Furthermore, the usability of these open-source tools have been assessed from an end user standpoint.