RESound: Interactive Sound Rendering for Dynamic Virtual Environments

Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, and Dinesh Manocha


Unified ray engine: These images show a house scene with specular reflection paths, diffraction paths, and diffuse reflection paths. The system also computes a statistical reverberation component.

Publications
RESound: Interactive Sound Rendering for Dynamic Virtual Environments
17th International ACM Conference on Multimedia 2009
We present an interactive algorithm and system (RESound) for sound propagation and rendering in virtual environments and media applications. RESound uses geometric propagation techniques for fast computation of propagation paths from a source to a listener and takes into account specular reflections, diffuse reflections, and edge diffraction. In order to perform fast path computation, we use a unified ray-based representation to efficiently trace discrete rays as well as volumetric ray-frusta. RESound further improves sound quality by using statistical reverberation estimation techniques. We also present an interactive audio rendering algorithm to generate spatialized audio signals. The overall approach can handle dynamic scenes with no restrictions on source, listener, or obstacle motion. Moreover, our algorithm is relatively easy to parallelize on multi-core systems. We demonstrate its performance on complex game-like and architectural environments.
ACM MM 2009 presentation on RESound
17th International ACM Conference on Multimedia 2009
This presentation gives an overview of the sound propagation theory used in RESound. A high-level overview of the workings of RESound is also presented.
Demonstrations
The RESound system can compute specular, diffuse, and diffraction contributions using a hybrid ray engine. Late reverberation effects are added by statistical means.

Overview

download 16mb

A simple tutorial showing the geometric acoustic paths that RESound can render.
Diffraction

download 3mb

First order reflection and diffraction with a moving source in a bedroom.
Reverberation

download 8mb

The effect of reverberation in scenes of various sizes.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Surya Murali and Marko Dabrovic for the excellent models. This work was sponsered by the ARO, DARPA/RDECOM, the NSF, Intel, and Microsoft.
Related Links
Acoustic research at GAMMA
Sound propagation using frustum tracing
Fast edge diffraction for sound propagation