ACUSTlCA· acta acustica

Vol. 82 (1996) 517 -525 © S. Hirzel Verlag· EAA 517

Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing - a New Algorithm for Room

Acoustics and Noise Immission Prognosis

Uwe M. Stephenson*
Fachhochschule Hamburg, Fachbereich Bauingenieurswesen, HebebrandstraBe I, 22297 Hamburg, Germany

Dedicated to Prof Heinrich Kuttruff on the occasion of his 65th birthday

Summary
Some ideas of a new room acoustical algorithm are outlined combining the advantages of three algorithms in one: the
mirror image source method, the sound particle simulation method and the radiosity method. Transient carriers of energy
are pyramidal beams ("pyrs") each representing a mirror image source which are split at each reflection or diffraction
thereby giving their energy to new pyrs. Above a certain reflection order, the pyrs are quantized with respect to source
position and solid angle. Their number is limited to an optimum. This Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing (QPBT)
converges to an efficient time dependent radiosity method, being able to take reflections and diffractions of higher
order into account but avoids the usually expected exponential increase in computation time. Applications concern not
only room acoustics but also the field of noise immission prognosis in a free field. Some fundamental properties of the
algorithm are discussed.
PACS no. 43.55.Ka, 43.58.Ta

1. State of the art are considered to represent constant solid angle fractions of
a spherical wave emitted from a point source. As with all
1.1. Algorithms of room acoustics numerical methods, additional errors have to be taken into
account. With ray tracing, this has to do with the fact that a
With increasing reflection order, the mirror image source
ray, i.e. an infinitesimally thin line, arbitrarily emitted from
(MIS) method (Borish, 1984), ray tracing methods (Krokstad
a source point almost never hits a receiver point. With other
et aI., 1968; Stephenson, 1985; Vian and v. Maercke, 1986)
words, 'pure ray tracing' does not exist. Either the rays or
and, for the reverberation tail, the radiosity method, prove
the receivers must be spatially extended.
to be most efficient. (The term 'radiosity' is well-known in
Rays with a non-vanishing cross section are called beams,
the fields of computer graphics and in lighting simulation,
which, in turn, may be cones with circular cross section
but, curious enough, not among acousticians - although the
or pyramids with polygonal cross sections. Cones have the
radiosity method is nothing else than the numerical formu-
advantage of ease of handling, however, the usually admit-
lation of Kuttruff's integral equation (Kuttruff, 1994).) It is
ted overlapping causes errors (Vian and v. Maercke, 1986).
presupposed here that the reader is familiar with the basic
This can be avoided by using pyramids, since all spaces of
concepts of mirror image source and ray tracing methods.
sound propagation are assumed to be approximately enclosed
Therefore, a short introduction and a quoting of only some
by polyhedra with polygons as walls and, hence, pyramidal
typical publications should be sufficient. However, as the dif-
beams of first order may each simply be built out of a wall
ferent assumptions and versions of these methods are often
polygon and the sound source point. Such a beam tracing
confused, especially the difference between ray and particle
(often implied by 'ray tracing') implies actually a scanning
tracing, the following classification may be useful.
of the room for MIS: Each time a receiver point is found to
The basic assumption of geometrical room acoustics i.e.
be within the beam the 1/r2-distance law of a point source
the optical limiting case of wavelengths small compared with
is applied. At reflections, beams are usually not split. Their
typical room dimensions is common to all methods consid-
new directions are determined by applying an appropriate
ered in this context. The MIS method is the most popular
reflection law to their 'middle rays'. Since in most cases a
method used for graphical ray constructions without com-
part of the beam's energy is reflected by neighbouring walls
puter. It replaces the situation of a source enclosed by a
this causes a scanning error - as it always occurs with a finite
polygonal room by a set of mirror sources in free field visible
number of rays. Pyramidal beams may be split according to
from a receiver, thus it is an indirect but deterministic algo-
the surface fractions which hit different walls of the room;
rithm. Ray tracing, on the other side, is a straight-forward
this avoids the scanning error (see below).
but statistical (or at least quasi-statistical) algorithm nec-
With strict ray tracing, the receivers are spatially extended
essarily depending on computers. Rays, as well as beams,
and are either spheres or cubes or of any shape. The sound
powers of rays or energies of 'sound particles' crossing these
Received 6 March 1995, to be published in ACUSTICA, 'detectors' are summed up. Thus the 1/r2-distance law is
accepted 23 J uly 1995. produced on average, in a statistical way. Concerning the
* Address until 1995: Fraunhofer-Institut fUr Bauphysik OBP),
tracing algorithm, there is no difference between particle and
Nobelstr. 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany ray tracing ('particles travel along rays'). The decisive differ-

518 U. M. Stephenson:A QuantizedPyramidalBeam Tracing
ence lies in the method of detection: with ray tracing one asks
for intensities, with the particle model the energy density in a
detector volume is the quantity directly computed. Therefore
the energies of crossing particles have to be weighted with the
inner crossing distances (or times). The idea is that the longer
a particle stays in the detector, the higher is its contribution
to the energy density. (With stationary emitted sound power,
the immitted energy density is proportional to the integral
over the whole echogramme; with an impulse experiment
one may consider a short time averaged energy density.) It
is due to that weighting of the particle model that there is
no directivity for non-spherical detectors, their sensitivity
is exclusively proportional to their volume (which is often
misunderstood). Only for ray tracing are spherical detectors
required. Cubic detectors have a computational advantage as
the algorithm to find the next detector being crossed by the
same particle is very effective (Stephenson, 1985).
With the radiosity method, radiation interchange depends
exclusively on the orientation of pairs of surface elements to
each other (and to a source and receiver point). This permits
a matrix of constant form factors to be set up. The solution
of the corresponding linear system of equations yields the
local radiosity values as an eigenvector. A precondition is the
assumption of totally diffuse reflections, or, more crucially,
"particles" must "forget" their past. All surfaces should be
subdivided into small elements of approximately equal size.
In summary, such a classification of numerical methods in
room acoustics reads as follows:
wave theory (for low frequencies):
finite or boundary element method (FEM or BEM)
geometrical theory (high frequencies):
specular reflections:
- deterministic: MIS method
specular or diffuse reflections:
- statistical: ray tracing methods:
- sound particle simulation (arbitrary detectors)
- ray tracing with spherical detectors
- beam tracing with point receivers:
- cone tracing
- pyramid tracing
·no splitting (criterion: middle ray)
,splitting (recursive)
diffuse reflections:
- radiosity method
The disadvantages of the methods are the following. The
classical MIS method, with increasing reflection order L,
leads to an exponential increase of MIS which have to be
constructed but are increasingly invisible. Hence the MIS
method leads to an exponential increase of computation time
and becomes ineffective (Stephenson, 1990a). Ray or parti-
cle tracing methods lead to an undersampling of the room
structure with higher order, and thus also become ineffec-
tive later. To reduce the computation time of ray tracing, a
number of methods were tested, mainly based on spatial sub-
dividing techniques. For room acoustics, the voxel technique
is most efficient (Forsberg, 1985; Stephenson, I990b). Beam
tracing, especially cone tracing, as mentioned above, can be
ACUSTICA· acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996)
considered as a hybrid method of the ray tracing and MIS
methods. Hybrid models (VorHignder, 1989; Naylor, 1992;
Heinz, 1993) make use of the advantage of the MIS method
in yielding exact MIS ideal for auralization and of the ad-
vantage of ray tracing in avoiding the exponential law of
computation time and replacing it by an L3-law. Recursive
pyramid tracing with splitting, finally is, as will be presented
here, the most effective version of the MIS method.
While the MIS method assumes specular reflections, ray
tracing methods may handle specular and diffuse reflections
as well. Some combined algorithms (Naylor, 1992; Heinz,
1993) exploit this ability. The radiosity method may be used
preferably for reverberation modelling as the diffusivity of
reflections does not only increase with the 'roughness' of
a surface but, due to its finite extension, also with the path
length an incident ray has travelled from the source (one may
consider Fresnel zones on the surface). Many authors, espe-
cially those at Professor Kuttruff's institute, have considered
the possibilities of combining the advantages of the different
methods. However, there is still a need for one single univer-
sal algorithm which is effective both for low and high order
reflections, and for both specular and diffuse reflections.
1.2. The tree problem of introducing diffraction into ray
tracing
For many problems of sound propagation, especially in a free
field, diffraction must be taken into account. While in closed
rooms reflections or the direct sound dominate the sound field
at almost every place, in free field shadow zones often oc-
cur where sound is incident exclusively via diffraction as for
example behind screening walls. While single screening can
still be handled analytically, e.g. by the deviation approach,
these methods fail with multiple screening, which often oc-
curs· with sound propagation in urban or industria] areas.
However, also in closed rooms, where apparently specular
reflections dominate, diffraction occurs according to Babi-
net's principle, namely at the walls' edges, which causes
diffusion to a certain extent. So far, diffraction is mainly a
low frequency effect.
Another cause of scattering and diffusion is the roughness
of the surfaces (e.g. at reliefs, stairs etc.), which becomes
important at higher frequencies. This is usually only glob-
ally described by a diffusivity coefficient D attached to every
wall (Stephenson, 1985). (D describes the extent to which
the reflection is diffuse; D = 0 for specular reflections,
D = 1for diffuse reflections, obeying Lambert's law.) In the
field of auralization, it has turned out that rooms modelled
with specularly reflecting sound are 'unnatural'. The qua]-
ity of aura]ization, which depends more sensitively on high
frequencies, may already be improved by the introduction of
some diffuse reflections.
Therefore, diffraction should also be introduced into room
acoustics, not only in the somewhat crude way of using dif-
fusivity coefficients but with a well-defined angular depen-
dence. In other words: It is desirable to extend the validity
of ray tracing to the lower frequencies, where the usually
assumed 'optical limiting case' is no longer valid and the
ACUSTlCA· acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996) U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing 519

Table 1. List of pyr data (to be stored dynamically for each pyr).

• type (quantized or not, diffracted or not)

• solid angle
• parameters of the last plane having been mirrored (truncating the pyr) for each frequency (octave) band:
• total sound energy (or power)
optionally if diffracted:
• the last source point before diffraction
• position and orientation of the diffracting edge
• diffraction angle around the edge
(with the help of these parameters, the correct angle and distance laws of edge diffraction may be applied
in each octave band)
+
if unquantized:
• source point (top of pyr)
• number of edges
for each edge:
• edge directional vector (normalized to I)
if quantized:
• quantum numbers nr, n{), n", for the position, and n();, ni3 for the direction which refer to the
actual position of the source point and the edge directional vectors of predefined pyr shapes

key parameters for sorting by "age":

• rtot = r + ro, where
r = distance from the source point of the unquantized pyr to the receiver and,
in the case of a diffracted pyr,
ro = total travelling distance of all foregoing pyrs
from the original source to that source point
• a key built from the quantum numbers nr, n{), n"" n();, ni3

wavelengths are no longer small compared to the room di-
mensions. Especially for noise immission prognosis in a free
field, the incorporation of diffraction into ray tracing would
make decisive progress.
In general, the problem is neither how to compute reflec-
tions nor how to compute diffraction, but how to simulate
any combination of reflection and diffraction events, at least
approximately. The localization of both reflection points on
(plane) surfaces and of diffraction points on (straight) edges
is governed by the Fermat principle. Thus all extremal paths
from any source to any receiver point have to be found. This
is, as with the MIS technique, a crucial algorithmical prob-
lem, except for some simple cases of the first order. Com-
plicated visibility and clipping problems have to be solved.
Obviously, this type of algorithm must be inefficient as it may
be assumed that only rays passing near the diffracting edges
of an environment really have to be treated. Hence, it is not
advisable to extend the classical MIS method by diffraction.
Straight-forward methods like the sound particle method
have the advantage that sound propagation is simulated
directly, and thus events of sound particles passing near
diffracting edges may easily be detected. However, known
diffraction formulae assume that rays hit edges exactly,
whereas sound particles never do that. Also, to compute
the amplitudes of the diffracted field, receiver points must
be specified, whereas sound particles are just emitted with-
out knowing receiver points in advance. With an interaction
model (Stephenson, 1992), the 'bending strength' of an edge
was introduced decreasing with increasing bypass distance.
This was derived, somewhat heuristically, from the concept
that the particle would 'see' a diffracting slit whose width is
proportional to the bypass distance. Sound particles passing
by were not split but bent according to an appropriate prob-
ability distribution. This model did not depend explicitly on
the edge-source or edge-receiver distances.
Another similar sound particle diffraction model could
later be derived analytically from the Fresnel-Kirchhoff the-
ory (Stephenson, 1993). Here, the problem of deriving di-
rectivity functions for sound particles to be diffracted when
passing an edge at a distance d was solved by considering the
change of transmission over a semi-infinite screen between
a source and a receiver point due to a vertical shift just of
d. With this model the reciprocity principle could be satis-
fied. Furthermore, even with less particles, it came to better
agreement with the known results of semi-infinite screen
diffraction. However, with both models, a large number of
sound particles have to be shot near to the edge to yield
a "correct" distribution. The postulate of indivisible sound

520 U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing
particles was abandoned. Thus with each scattering event,
sound particles are split into several new ones. It had to be
recognized that staying with one particle and taking the di-
rectional distribution as a probability distribution would not
save computational time as, to the same extent, more sound
particles had to be emitted from the source which costs even
higher computational effort.
However, with higher orders of diffraction, splitting im-
plies a recursive algorithm, a tree structure of ray tracing,
which makes the computation time explode. Thus all the ad-
vantages of the above-mentioned efficient algorithms and of
the hybrid methods are again destroyed. Also, a simple trun-
cating of the tree, e.g. above a fixed scattering order, would
not be correct in any case (as the immitted energy rather than
the order should be the truncation criterion; however, the
immitted energy is not predictable in advance). In general,
against such an exponential increase of computation time
only a qualitatively new algorithm will help.
2. Proposed solutions
2.1. Overcoming the tree structure
The basic idea behind the present work was the following.
Within an enclosure where the total energy decreases with
time, it cannot make sense to follow an exponentially in-
creasing number of particles, particularly because details of
the sound field become less audible with decay time. (The
diffusivity and hence the degree of splitting itself is even
increasing with reflection order.) Why then is the radiosity
method so efficient, although it handles diffuse reflections
which can be considered to be a kind of diffraction? Energy
flows are not only split but also re-unified! The number of
"rays" or paths of energy interchange remains KJ (if Ko is
the number of wall elements). To realize this procedure with
sound particles, the sound particles would have to be traced
in parallel and it has to be checked which sound particles are
approximately at the same place and travel in approxiately the
same direction. However, a statistical analysis showed that
the probability for that coincidence is extremely small, and
the computation time would explode before recombinations
occur. Hence, the sound particle model has to be abandoned!
A method to overcome the tedious searching for coincidence
is the "sorting" of energy into pre-defined quantized energy
carriers of standardized form. Thus not only should the room
surface be quantized as with radiosity, and not only the di-
rectional space as with ray tracing, but both of them should
be quantized! This lead to the idea of "pyrs".
2.2. First step: The introduction of pyrs
A pyr is a beam of polygonal cross-section originating from a
source point being the top of an infinite pyramid. Hence, each
pyr is limited by a number of edge rays and the planes be-
tween those rays. A pyr may also be truncated by a plane i.e.
the wall at which it was last reflected. According to the typi-
cal room acoustical point of view, assuming that wavelengths
ACUSTICA . acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996)
are small compared with the room dimensions, incoherence
is presupposed and, as with sound particles, energies rather
than amplitudes are considered. Thus, pyrs are carriers of
energies of different frequency bands (or sound powers with
stationary radiating sources). In summary, a pyr is a tran-
sient carrier of a certain amount of energy of diverging shape
(transient, as each pyr is going to be split). A complete pyr
data structure is given in Table I.
At the same time, a pyr is equivalent to a MIS with a limited
range of radiation and visibility. In contrast to cones, which
cause overlapping problems (Vian and v. Maercke, 1986), the
advantage of pyrs is that the whole solid angle can be densely
covered. At each mirroring at a wall, the wall's edges clip the
pyr, the pyr is mirrored and split up into new ones (Figure I.)
wherein the energy which is transported by the pyr is divided
into portions according to the ratio of the cross-sections. The
sum of the solid angles of all the "children" of a MIS equals
the solid angle of the "mother" pyr (Kristiansen et aI., 1993).
The decisive point is, that, during the recursive mirroring,
more and more combinations are dropped, never visible MIS
(not visible from any receiver point) are never constructed,
hence, the tree does not grow exponentially, but only, by
physical reasons, with the reflection order L to the third
power. The degree of splitting decreases to I, and thus the
mirroring converges against the non-splitting beam tracing
(Figure 2.). In contrast to that kind of pyr tracing, with the
classical MIS method, invisible MIS of the Lth order may
have visible "children", MIS of the (L + l)th order, and,
hence, for every receiver point, an exponentially growing
number of MIS has to be tested. Thus pyr tracing is equivalent
to the MIS method being its probably most efficient version
(presumably equivalent to the method of Lee (Lee and Lee,
1988), which, however is explained less clearly).
However, the intersection of pyrs with polygons, and clip-
ping of the pyrs by "barring" walls of non-convex rooms is
more complicated than with ray tracing. While with ray trac-
ing, at each reflection within a loop over all walls, a point-
in-polygon-test has to be performed, with pyr tracing the
two-dimensional problem of a polygon-polygon-intersection
has to be solved. The overlapping polygons each form a re-
flected pyr, the remaining polygon is tested for intersection
with another wall etc. (see the splitting of fans in the two-
dimensional case of Figure I). This is continued until the pyr
is entirely split (and possibly a remaining polygon is trans-
mitted without reflection). Each pyr is recursively traced and
split again etc. It can be shown that, with continued split-
ting, the shape of the pyrs does not become more and more
"cleft", i.e. does not develop more edges. (The whole pyr
tracing algorithm is summarized in Table II.)
Detection, i.e. the computation of immission, is finally
handled in the same way as with every beam tracing or MIS
method. During pyr tracing, an energy per cross section (or
an intensity respectively) is detected from all receiver points
lying within a pyr beam and summed up corresponding to
the distance from the top of the pyr, the MIS.
ACUSTlCA· acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996)
5124 not constructable
/
Figure I. Mirroring of pyrs (here, two-dimensional fans, such that
solid angle ranges of visibility are simply replaced by angularranges.
S: source points). An example that not all combinations are possible;
here Pyrl2 does not cover wall 4 and hence is not split into a Pyrl24
with MIS Sl24 as a source point, thus the number of MIS does not
increase exponentially but only with L~ (see Figures 2 and 7).
}~
E
••
.8
.[
t
}f
Figure 2. Tree of recursive pyr tracing: the degree of splitting de-
creases with higher mirroring order to I.
2.3. Second step; The introduction of diffraction
In the context of pyr tracing, different approaches to diffrac-
tion are possible. With a typical room acoustical approach,
diffraction is considered as a special case of scattering caused
by "rough" surfaces (Stephenson, 1985; Naylor, 1992; Heinz,
1993). For that purpose, another type of pyr may be created
whose source points, according to Huygens's principle, sit
on the scattering surfaces themselves instead of being be-
hind them. The usual 1/r2 distance law is now valid from
that secondary source point, to which a certain energy (or
power) was assigned according to the overlap of the scatter-
ing surface with the incident pyr. With another, even more
simple model for the case of rough surfaces, a geometri-
cally constructed MIS (the pyr's source point) is randomly
shifted in the outer space causing, equivalent to the model
of diffuse ray reflection, a shift of the beam's direction. The
total distance travelled from the original source to the pyr's
source point ro must be saved. An appropriate number, q, of
secondary pyrs is emitted.
U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing 521
reflected
pyr
I
i
i
\
\
,
i
..-j-
--- --- \.
-,-
'
I
)
s
diffracted pyrs
Figure 3. Zones of reflected and diffracted pyrs at an inner wedge of a
room; a) (above) from the side; the diffracting edge is perpendicular
to the drawing plane, b) (below) from above. S: source, S': mirror
Image source.
Another approach mainly aims at an exact modelling of the
directivity of diffraction, assuming edges rather than surfaces
as the basic elements of diffraction. For that purpose, some
pyrs of the above-mentioned type may be emitted either from
some edge zones on the surfaces near edges, or from points
on the edges themselves. A more accurate, and at the same
time more efficient, model replaces the source points of pyrs
by source edges of finite length, (thus creating a type of
pyr which no longer actually possesses a pyramidal shape).
The edge source of such a pyr is the diffracting edge or that
fraction of an edge which was within an incident pyr. The
position of the previous source point of that pyr must also
be saved as a parameter of diffraction. In addition to the
reflected pyr and the transmitted rest pyr, at least 3 new pyrs
are emitted from the diffracting edge (Figure 3a): into the
shadow zone, into the visible zone and into the reflection
zone. All these pyrs have 4 edges, 2 from each end point of
the part of the diffracting edge being hit by the incident pyr.
From Fermat's principle of shortest deviation, all the edge
diffracted rays must lie on cones (Keller, 1962). Therefore,
the 4 edge rays of these pyrs lie at the same time on cones
whose apertures are determined from the aperture of the
incident pyr (Figure 3b), and on two planes with the same
diffraction angles. (Diffraction angles are measured around
the edge relative to the plane of the incident pyr built by the
source point with the edge.)

522 U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing
These diffracted "pyrs" may be traced in the same way
as the reflected type of real pyramids, but they carry an-
other distance and angle law for the case of detection by
receiver points obeying the principles of edge diffraction (no
longer the simple point source law). That is, amplitudes de-
pend not only on the edge-receiver distance but also on the
source-edge distance, and the diffraction angle. For this pur-
pose, the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction" (GTD) (Keller,
1962) may be applied, as an asymptotic high frequency so-
lution for hard or soft wedges. As an improvement which
yields, furthermore, the required smooth transitions at the
shadow and reflection boundaries (Figure 3a) a "Uniform
Theory of Diffraction" (UTD) was developed (Kouyoumjian
and Pathak, 1974). (All these approaches are described in
(Schroth and Stein, 1985).) As the GTD or the UTD yield am-
plitude functions including interference effects, these func-
tions are typically made for single frequencies and, hence,
are strongly frequency dependent, which is not very suitable
for the present purpose. Within the energy model of pyr trac-
ing made for relatively wide frequency bands, appropriate
averaged energy functions for each frequency band and for
the different zones of interference will have to be found. To
account for the 'correction' due to diffraction, this implies
negative energies e.g. for the pyr diffracted into the visible
zone. This is one problem of the method.
Another problem is how to handle double or multiple
diffraction. However, with pyr tracing, this is no longer an
algorithmical problem, but only a question of approxima-
tion. It will be reasonable to assume independent subsequent
diffractions, or more accurately, edge diffraction for incident
spherical waves for edges which are more than a few wave-
lengths apart from each other. A similar approach based on
pyramidal beams handling reflections and diffractions has
already been published (Jaroch et ai., 1990).
Thus another decisive advantage of the pyr concept be-
comes obvious. The possibly recursive splitting procedure
due to diffraction does not differ qualitatively from the split-
ting by specular reflection at edges. However, the above-
mentioned efficiency of pyr tracing (diminishing splitting
factors) vanishes: the number of pyrs again would explode
(see Figure 7.)
2.4. Third step: Quantization of pyrs
So far, the special power of the pyr concept with respect to
re-unification has not yet been exploited. Therefore, a quan-
tization is needed. Having the appropriate capability of the
radiosity method in mind, one might intend to introduce an
additional quantization of the half space in front of each sur-
face patch into Jo directions, and to replace Lambert's law
by a reference to a scattering matrix in order to account also
for partly geometrical reflections. However, to preserve the
correct distance law, the information about the path lengths
must not be lost and the energies of "rays" having travelled
different distances from the source must not be mixed to-
gether, but stored in different memory places. In general, a
time dependent solution is needed. Therefore, such a simple
ACUSTICA· acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996)
Figure 4. Quantization of pyrs with respect to position and direction:
grid of MIS cells around the original room. S: source, R: receiver.
generalization of the radiosity method would not be suffi-
cient. Also, a (KoJo)2-matrix, in general, would burst any
computer memory (consider Ko = Jo = 1000). On the
other hand, if one considers the MIS model, the number of
mirror image sources increases drastically, too, namely pro-
portionally to their order to the third power. However, with
increasing distance, it becomes less important exactly where
the MIS are. Hence the quantization of the "sky of the mirror
image sources" (Figure 4) suggests itself.
Each cell of the MIS space is thus described by 3 quantum
numbers according to the spherical co-ordinates r, 1J, <p (i.e.
r, 1J, <p are discretized). r is counted best from a receiver
point in the original room rather than from the source, such
that r is proportional to the total time delay of a reflection
as noticed by the receiver. (With many receivers this is not
exactly achievable for all of them at the same time; this,
however, causes only some inefficiency, see the remark at
the beginning of section 3. In any case, pyrs are constructed
only once, not repeatedly for each receiver.) Now, any pyr's
source point, after splitting and mirroring (see Figure I) falls
into such a MIS cell and is shifted ("rectified") to the middle
of the cell (see Figure 4). This is the spatial quantization (or
discretization). However, for later sorting, and in order to
avoid an adding of the quantization errors, an unquantized
value of r is retained. To achieve a finite number of MIS
cells, one might propose to quantize the radial parameter r
such that not Llr but Ll(I/r) is constant. This, however, is
not necessary as a dynamical storage is planned. Hence, Llr
may be constant. Since also Ll1J and LlO = sin 1JLl1JLl<p
should be approximately constant, the volume of the MIS
cells is proportional to r2 or to the reflection order L2, hence
their number per reflection order is constant.
In a second step of quantization, the energy of the pyr is
distributed over several new pyrs of quantized solid angle
ACUSTICA· acta acustica
Vol. 82 (1996)
unquantized
pyr
filling with
energy according
to the fraction
of overlap
Figure 5. Geometry for the directional quantization of pyrs (here two-
dimensional fans); quantized pyrs of pre-defined shape are filled with
sound energy according to the directional overlap with the former
unquantized pyr.
quantization with respect to source position and radiation angles
--------------------
quantized
mirroring
and
scattering
unquantized
mirroring
and
scattering
Figure 6. Above a certain reflection order, pyrs are sorted into quan-
tized standard beams (here symbolically columns) thus avoiding a
further exponential increase.
ranges directed towards the original room (Figure 4). (The
term 'quantization' denotes here the crucial quantization or
discretization of solid angles rather than of energies as in
quantum physics; the' content' of a pyr, its energy, may have
any value.) However, the solid angles need not be computed
in most cases, as the energy per solid angle remains con-
stant except for the pyrs at the side where these values are
interpolated according to the degree of directional overlap
(Figure 5). These quantized pyrs should cover almost a con-
stant solid angle and may be of any convenient form, e.g.
triangular (subdividing the triangle surfaces of an icosahe-
dron (Lewers, 1993», or quadratic (subdividing a cube). Of
course, quantization errors such as the violation of the vis-
ibility conditions for MIS must be taken into account. The
same, except for the spatial quantization, is also valid for
the diffracted pyrs. Each pyr is completely described by the
parameters listed in Table I.
U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing 523
10g(M)
_ visible MIS
construc- ,..." no. 01 pyrs
table MIS , _ L'3
: _ KoL
1
1
-- re-unification
quantized
/ pyr tracing
-~--------- Mo
ray tracing method
L = order of reflection or scattering
Figure 7. Comparison of different numerical methods with respect
to the growth of the number of energy carriers Ko= number of
walls (polygons), q= splitting factor with scattering, No= number of
emitted sound particles, Mo= max. and opt. number of pyrs.
Note, that (in contrast to (Naylor, 1992) and (Lewers,
1993» specular and diffuse reflections may occur in any
order; therefore, specular reflections (at large and smooth
walls) may also happen again after diffuse ones. This, how-
ever, will seldom be the case, as with increasing distance from
the source reflections will become more and more diffuse,
until, within the reverberation tail, energy is interchanged
almost exclusively by diffuse reflections.
The decisive moments are now those where a pyr's top
falls into a MIS cell already occupied by a pyr of the same
directional range. These are the events of the desired re-
unification of pyrs to truncate the useless increase of energy
carriers and the storage need (Figures 6 and 7).
Furthermore, re-unification will happen more frequently
with increasing reflection order, L, as the number of MIS
increases, as L2, whereas the number of MIS cells of same
order remains constant. However, to make use of this, an
almost parallel pyr tracing is required.
3. The algorithm of quantized pyramidal beam tracing
With each mirroring, the top of a pyr drifts outwards in the
MIS space. (Actually, this is only the case for image sources
visible from that receiver point which is the origin of the
MIS space. As an exception, the "child" of a MIS might also
come nearer to the origin but, due to the causality principle, it
must be invisible from there and hence irrelevant. However,
with several receiver points, it might be visible from another
receiver point.) Thus during parallel pyr tracing, a "cloud" of
occupied MIS cells drifts outwards. Its radial range is limited
to twice the room diagonal. This makes it possible to release
the computer storage for inner cells and use it again for newly
created pyrs in outer cells. This means a dynamical pyr data
 ACUSTICA· acta acustica
524 U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing Vol. 82 (1996)

Table II. Rough outline of the algorithm of QPBT.

repeat
in initial state:
take the original source
else
find the "oldest" pyr
loop over all walls (polygons) (:::splitting procedure)
for each wall (at least partly visible from the source):
if direct sound:
built a pyr from the source and the wall
else
test whether pyr intersects wall at least partly
if yes
project the pyr onto the wall
compute the common cross section (polygon-polygon intersection)
mirror the pyr (the rest is automatically handled)
loop over all receiver points
if point is within pyr
compute immission (if diffracted according diffraction laws)
if age rtot is greater than quantization boundary
quantize (rectify) the pyr's top position
loop over predefined quantized pyrs
find pyrs with directional overlap
sort initial pyr into quantized pyrs (inherit energy)
until age rtot exceeds given limit or pyr energy is negligible

processing but also requires parallel processing. To minimize
the computational effort and to make use of the radiallimita-
tion, the "oldest", i.e. most inner pyr should always be treated
first, i.e. mirrored, rectified and quantized. Then it "dies" and
leaves its energy to "new born" or already "living" pyrs (the
latter case is an event of reunification of pyr energies). The
principle "oldest first" means a continuous overtaking pro-
cess rather than a parallel process. In spite ofthat continuous
"inheritance" of energy, the total number of "living", i.e. oc-
cupied pyrs does not exceed a given maximum (optimized
according to the computer memory) but only approaches it,
varying statistically (Figure 7).
For repetition, the process of immission, i.e. computing
energy densities, echogrammes etc. with QPBT, is the same
as with the well known MIS method and need not be ex-
plained. The tops of the pyrs, whether quantized or not, may
be handled as MIS, and the receivers gain energy, if lying
within the pyr. The directivity of the sources as well as of
the listeners may be introduced. Room acoustical parameters
may be computed in the approved way. Obviously, aural-
ization is possible, too. (The time interval of pyr quantiza-
tion has nothing to do with the sampling rate.) Moreover,
echogrammes may be computed at the same time for differ-
ent frequency bands with different degrees of diffusivity -
another advantage of QPBT. Impulse responses may be de-
rived from echogrammes in the known manner, e.g. as in
(Heinz, 1993). The total recursive algorithm is outlined in
Table II.
4. An interpretation of quantized pyramidal beam
tracing
The secret of QPBT can be seen as a direct analogy to popu-
lation development. Although everybody has a tree of gener-
ations in the past ("parents") and a tree of generations in the
future ("children") the whole population does not necessarily
grow exponentially. The simple reason: man must die. Disre-
garding absorption, the total heritage of the "society ofpyrs",
i.e. the total energy, remains constant. Energy is distributed,
in the beginning more regularly, with increasing reflection
order and time with increasing diffusion (entropy).
5. Remaining problems and conclusion
QPBT is an algorithm well adapted to specular reflection,
diffraction and diffusion of sound in rooms. Although more
details of the algorithm have been developed than are de-
scribed here, some problems of dynamical storage and ac-
cess of pyr data still have to be solved such as rapid access
according to two different keys (distance r and quantum num-
bers), the three-dimensional overlap of pyrs, approximations
of multiple diffraction, the quantization of diffracted pyrs,
etc .. The total algorithm is yet to be tested. With the archi-
tecture of this algorithm, problems of multiple reflection and
the diffraction of sound propagation mainly in the free field,
which have been unsolved for a long time, may possibly be
solved in reasonable computation times.
ACUSTICA· acta aeustiea
Vol. 82 (1996)
Acknowledgement
The idea of QPBT was developed at the Institute for Telecom-
munications, Acoustics Group, of the Norwegian Institute of
Technology (NTH), Trondheim in 1992. The author grate-
fully acknowledges funding from the Norwegian Research
Council for this study. The author is indebted for support and
many fruitful discussions to Professor U. R. Kristiansen and
Professor A. Krokstad (NTH), to K. NaBhan (IBP) and, last
but not least, Professor H. Kuttruff (Institute for Technical
Acoustics, Aachen) - at whose institute the author's work on
sound particles began 15 years ago (Stephenson, 1985).
References
Borish, J. (1984). Extension of the image model to arbitrary poly-
hedra. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 75, 1827~ 1836.
Forsberg, P.-A. (1985). Fully discrete ray tracing. Appl. Acoustics
18,393-397.
Heinz, R. (1993). Binaural room simulation based on an image
source model with addition of statistical methods to include the
diffuse sound scattering of walls and to predict the reverberant
tail. Appl. Acoustics 38, 145-159.
Jaroch, A., Jurkiewicz, J., and Rudno-Rudzinska, B. (1990). A ge-
ometrical analysis of reflected-diffracted sound rays in three di-
mensional space. Proc. INTERNOISE '90, Gothenburg, Sweden,
239-242.
Keller, J. B. (1962). Geometrical theory of diffraction. J. Opt. Soc.
Am. 52, 116-130.
Kouyoumjian, R. G. and Pathak,P. H. (1974). A uniform geometrical
theory of diffraction for an edge in a perfectly conducting surface.
Proc. IEEE 62,1448-1461.
Kristiansen, U. R., Krokstad, A., and Follestad, T. (1993). Extending
the image method to higher-order reflections. Appl. Acoustics 38,
195-202.
U. M. Stephenson: A Quantized Pyramidal Beam Tracing 525
Krokstad, A., Strom, P., and Sorsdahl, P. (1968). Calculating the
acoustical room response by the use of the ray tracing technique.
J. Sound Vib. 8, 118-125.
Kuttruff, K. H. (1994). Sound decay in enclosures with non-diffuse
sound fields. Proc. WC.Sabine Centennial Symposium, Cam-
bridge, Mass. (USA), 1pAAa3.
Lee, H. and Lee, B.-H. (1988). An efficient algorithm for the image
model technique. Appl. Acoustics 24,87-115.
Lewers, T. (1993). A combined beam tracing and radiant exchange
computer model of room acoustics. Appl. Acoustics 38, 161-178.
Naylor, G. (1992). Treatment of early and late reflections in a hybrid
computer model for room acoustics. Proc. of 124th ASA" New
Orleans, 3aAAZ.
Schroth, A. and Stein, V. (1985). Moderne numerische Verfahren
zur Losung von Antennen- und Streuproblemen. Oldenburg,
Mtinchen/Wien.
Stephenson, U. M. (1985). Eine Schallteilchen-Computer-
Simulation zur Berechnung der fUr die Horsamkeit in Konz-
ertsalen maBgebenden Parameter. Acustica 59, 1-20.
Stephenson, U. M. (1990a). Comparison of the mirror image source
method and the sound particle simulation method. Appl. Acoustics
29,35-72.
Stephenson, U. M. (I 990b). Room acoustical design of concert
halls: Some recent improvements on the sound particle simulation
technique. 29th Conference on Acoustics, Strebske Pleso, High
Tatra, 259-264.
Stephenson, U. M. (1992). Diffraction algorithms for ray tracing -
discussion of some approaches. Proc. International Congress on
Acoustics (ICA), Beijing (China), F2~9.
Stephenson, U. M. (1993). Ein neuer Ansatz zur Schallteilchenbeu-
gung. Fortschritte der Akustik, DAGA 1993, DPG GmbH, Bad
Honnef, 235~238.
Vian, J. P. and v. Maercke, D. (1986). Calculation of the room
impulse response using a ray tracing method. Proc. ICA (Sympo-
sium on Acoustics and Theatre Planningfor the Performing Arts),
Vancouver, Canada, 74~78.
Vorlagnder, M. (1989). Simulation of the transient and steady-state
sound propagation in rooms using a new combined ray-tracing
image source algorithm. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 172-178.