Sound Synthesis and Propagation 
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in sound rendering for interactive applications. Our group has
been working on novel algorithms for sound synthesis, as well as geometric and numeric approaches for sound propagation.
Symphony: Real-time Physically-based Sound Synthesis for Large Scale Environments
Nikunj Raghuvanshi and Ming C. Lin
We present an interactive approach for generating realistic physically-based sounds from rigid-body dynamic simulations. We use spring-mass systems to model each object's local deformation and vibration, which we demonstrate to be an adequate approximation for capturing physical effects such as magnitude of impact forces, location of impact, and rolling sounds. No assumption is made about the mesh connectivity or topology. Surface meshes used for rigid-body dynamic simulation are utilized for sound simulation without any modifications. We use results in auditory perception and a novel priority-based quality scaling scheme to enable the system to meet variable, stringent time constraints in a real-time application, while ensuring minimal reduction in the perceived sound quality. With this approach, we have observed up to an order of magnitude speed-up compared to an implementation without the acceleration. As a result, we are able to simulate moderately complex simulations with upto hundreds of sounding objects at over 100 frames per second (FPS), making this technique well suited for interactive applications like games and virtual environments. Furthermore, we utilize OpenAL and EAX on Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 cards for fast hardware-accelerated propagation modeling of the synthesized sound.
Project website...
Physics-based Liquid Sound Synthesis
William Moss, Hengchin (Yero) Yeh, Ming C. Lin, and Dinesh Manocha
We present a novel approach for synthesizing liquid sounds directly from visual simulations of fluid dynamics. The sound generated by liquid is mainly due to the vibration of resonating bubbles in the medium. Our approach couples physically-based equations for bubble resonance with a real-time shallow-water fluid simulator as well as an hybrid SPH-grid-based simulator to perform automatic sound synthesis. Our system has been effectively demonstrated on several benchmarks.
Project website...
AD-Frustum: Adaptive Frustum Tracing for Interactive Sound Propagation
Anish Chandak, Christian Lauterbach, Micah Taylor, Zhimin Ren, and Dinesh Manocha
We present an interactive algorithm to compute sound propagation paths for transmission, specular refection and edge diffraction in complex scenes. Our formulation uses an adaptive frustum representation that is automatically sub-divided to accurately compute intersections with the scene primitives. We describe a simple and fast algorithm to approximate the visible surface for each frustum and generate new frusta based on specular refection and edge diffraction. Our approach is applicable to all triangulated models and we demonstrate its performance on architectural and outdoor models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles and moving objects. In practice, our algorithm can perform geometric sound propagation in complex scenes at 4-20 frames per second on a multi-core PC.
Paper... (IEEE Visualization, 2008)
Interactive Sound Propagation in Dynamic Scenes using Frustum Tracing
Christian Lauterbach, Anish Chandak, Micah Taylor, Zhimin Ren, and Dinesh Manocha
We present a new approach for simulating real-time sound propagation in complex, virtual scenes with dynamic sources and objects. Our approach combines the efficiency of interactive ray tracing with the accuracy of tracing a volumetric representation. We use a four-sided convex frustum and perform clipping and intersection tests using ray packet tracing. A simple and efficient formulation is used to compute secondary frusta and perform hierarchical traversal. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in an interactive system for game-like environments and architectural models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles. Our algorithm can simulate and render sounds at interactive rates on a high-end PC.
Project website...
Interactive Edge-diffraction for Sound Propagation in Complex Virtual Environments
Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Zhimin Ren, Christian Lauterbach, and Dinesh Manocha
We present an algorithm for interactive computation of diffraction paths for geometric-acoustics in complex environments. Our method extends ray-frustum tracing to efficiently compute volumetric regions of the sound field caused by long diffracting edges. We compute accurate diffraction paths from each source to the listener and based on the Uniform Theory of Diffraction, attenuate the input audio. The overall approach is general, can handle dynamic scenes, and can be used to compute diffraction and specular reflection paths with relatively little aliasing. We evaluate the accuracy through comparisons with physically validated geometric simulations. In practice, our edge diffraction algorithm can perform sound propagation at interactive rates in dynamic scenarios on a multi-core PC.
Project website...
RESound: Interactive Sound Rendering for Dynamic Virtual Environments
Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, and Dinesh Manocha
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.
Project website...
Efficient Numerical Simulation of Sound Propagation
Nikunj Raghuvanshi, Rahul Narain, Nico Galoppo, and Ming C. Lin
Accurate sound rendering can add significant realism to complement visual display, as well as facilitate acoustic predictions for many real-life applications. In this paper, we present a technique which relies on an adaptive rectangular decomposition of a three-dimensional scene to enable efficient and accurate simulation of sound propagation in complex virtual environments. It exploits the known analytical solution of the Wave Equation in rectangular domains and is thus able to achieve at least an order of magnitude performance gain compared to a standard FDTD implementation, while also being memory-efficient. Consequently, we are able to perform accurate numerical acoustic simulation on large, complex scenes in the kilohertz range which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been previously attempted on a desktop computer. This work offers accelerated computation of accurate sound propagation for large scenes on commodity hardware, enabling realistic auditory display for virtual environments and accurate acoustics analysis for architectural design.
Project website...
Principal Investigators
Research Sponsors
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Current Members
Past Members
- Nico Galoppo
- William Moss
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