I was having a discussion at work today on how to improve room acoustic modelling. It was suggested that very little work appears to have been done on the subject yet tonnes has been done in graphics. It was further suggested that as sound and light are just wave forms it might be possible to use things like ray tracing and radios to get a good approximation.

At this point I began thinking about spherical harmonics to simulate this behaviour. You could simultaneously do specular-esque reflections as well as audio scattering modelled as diffuse reflections. As a bonus you'd also get obstructions blocking sound transfer. The only problem was how to handle the attenuation of multiple frequencies. Surely though this could be modelled by applying some form of transform to the audio spectrum (FFT).

Anyway does anybody know of any papers on this subject, especially on how it would be performed in real-time. Failing that anybody got any advice or useful general information?