# Estimation of Room Impulse Responses from Handclaps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35839/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Pyroomacoustics: A Python package for audio room simulations and array processing algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04196/) (2017)
- [Building and Evaluation of a Real Room Impulse Response Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06795/) (2018)
- [Similarity Metrics For Late Reverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14836/) (2024)
- [Ambisonics Encoding of Room Impulse Responses using a Device-Agnostic Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14097/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Handclaps provide an equipment-free excitation for room acoustics, but their unknown and variable source waveform makes room impulse response (RIR) estimation challenging. In this work, we investigate whether RIRs can be estimated directly from handclaps. To this end, we introduce an anechoic handclap dataset containing 2,540 claps from 17 participants, designed to capture variability across natural claps and different hand configurations. We first establish the performance attainable when the excitation clap is known using regularized deconvolution, and show that approximating the unknown excitation by windowing the direct sound from the reverberant recording is insufficient. To estimate the RIR without a known excitation, we propose using the anechoic handclap recordings to train a deep neural network with a supervised regression objective. Evaluated on a controlled synthetic benchmark, the proposed neural regressor significantly outperforms windowing-based baselines across all instrumental metrics. Furthermore, we test the proposed method on handclap recordings measured in real acoustic spaces, showing that the inferred RIR spectra are consistent across different handclap measurements taken in the same room location. These results showcase the feasibility of directly estimating RIRs from natural handclaps without requiring knowledge of the excitation signal.