A comparison of methods to compute the "effective duration" of the autocorrelation function and an alternative proposal

The "effective duration" of the autocorrelation function (ACF), tau(e), is an important factor in architectural and musical acoustics. For a general application, an accurate evaluation of tau(e) is relevant. This paper is focused to the methods for the extraction of tau(e) values from the ACF. Various methods have been proposed in literature for the extraction of the tau(e) from a given signal, but these methods are not unambiguously defined or may not work properly in case of particular signals. Therefore, the general use of these methods may sometimes give rise to questionable results. In the present work, the methods existing in literature for extracting tau(e) are analyzed, their advantages and drawbacks are summarized, and finally an alternative method is proposed. The proposed algorithm is compared to those found in previous literature, applying them on the same sound signals (classic literature references and other ones publicly available on the Internet). It is shown that the results obtained with the proposed method are consistent with the results of the previous literature; moreover the proposed method may overcome some of the limitations of the existing methods. (C) 2011 Acoustical Society of America. [DOI: 10.1121/1.3624818]