Evaluation of acoustic Green's function in rectangular rooms with general surface impedance walls

Abstract

Acoustic room modes admit closed-form expressions for rectangular rooms with perfectly reflecting walls, from which the Green's function can be computed directly through the eigenfunction expansion. First-order approximations also exist for nearly rigid boundaries; however, current analytical methods fail to accommodate more general boundary conditions, e.g., when wall absorption is significant. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis that extends previous studies by including additional first-order asymptotics that account for soft-wall boundaries. In addition, we introduce a semi-analytical, efficient, and reliable method for computing the Green's function in rectangular rooms, which is described and verified through numerical tests. The resulting error decreases rapidly for sufficiently large truncation order, making the method suitable as a benchmark for numerical simulations. Additional aspects regarding the spectral basis orthogonality and completeness are also addressed, providing a general framework for the validity of the proposed approach.