Accounting for delay of energy transfer between coupled rooms in statistical-acoustics models of reverberant-energy decay.

A statistical-acoustics model for energy decay in systems of two or more coupled rooms is introduced, which accounts for the distribution of delay in the transfer of energy between subrooms that results from the finite speed of sound. The method extends previous models based on systems of coupled ordinary differential equations by using functional differential equations to explicitly model dependence on prior values of energy in adjacent subrooms. Predictions of the model are illustrated for a two-room coupled system and compared with the predictions of a benchmark computational geometrical-acoustics model.