Sound Rendering for Physically Based Simulation

NSF-Project HCC-0905506 (2009-)

Cornell University
Department of Computer Science

Project Summary

Computational physics can help us animate crashing rigid and deformable bodies, or fracturing solids, or splashing water, but the results are silent movies: virtually no practical algorithms exist for synthesizing synchronized sounds automatically. Instead, sound recordings are edited manually for pre-produced animations or triggered automatically in interactive settings. The former is labor intensive and inflexible; the latter produces awkward, repetitive results. This situation is a serious obstacle to building realistic, interactive simulations—which require sound to be compelling—for entertainment, training, or other applications.

The proposed research will begin filling this broad void by pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems, aiming to produce some of the first viable methods in this area, upon which many more can be built. Successful implementation of this program will fundamentally transform our relationship with our increasingly convincing simulated realities, because for the first time we will be able to hear them as well as see them.

People

Video Summary (2010)

Related Publications
Jeffrey Chadwick and Doug L. James, Animating Fire with Sound, ACM Transactions on Graphics, August 2011 (to appear)


Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James, Toward High-Quality Modal Contact Sound, ACM Transactions on Graphics,  August 2011 (to appear)

Rigid-Body Fracture Sound
 Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James, Rigid-Body Fracture Sound with Precomputed Soundbanks, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 29(3), July 2010.

Subspace Self-Collision Culling (SSCC)
 Jernej Barbic and Doug L. James, Subspace Self-Collision Culling, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 29(3), July 2010.

Harmonic Shells
 Jeffrey Chadwick, Steven An, and Doug L. James, Harmonic Shells: A Practical Nonlinear Sound Model for Near-Rigid Thin Shells, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 28(5), December 2009, pp. 119:1-119:10.

Harmonic Fluids
 Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James, Harmonic Fluids, ACM Transaction on Graphics, 28(3), July 2009, pp. 37:1-37:12.

Optimizing Cubature Steven An, Theodore Kim and Doug L. James, Optimizing Cubature for Efficient Integration of Subspace Deformations, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(5), December 2008, pp. 164:1-164:11.

Fast modal sounds... Nicolas Bonneel, George Drettakis, Nicolas Tsingos, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon and Doug L. James, Fast Modal Sounds with Scalable Frequency-Domain Synthesis, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(3), August 2008, pp. 24:1-24:9.

Precomputed Acoustic Transfer
Doug L. James, Jernej Barbić and Dinesh K. Pai, Precomputed Acoustic Transfer: Output-sensitive, accurate sound generation for geometrically complex vibration sources, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 25(3), pp. 987-995, July 2006, pp. 987-995.

Acknowledgement and Disclaimer

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award HCC-0905506. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF), or other organizations.

Additional support and donations were obtained from the following organizations: