Synthesizing physics-based vortex and collision sound in virtual reality

Abstract

We present an integrated system for synthesizing realistic physically based sounds from rigid-body dynamic simulations. Our research endeavor is twofold, including vortex sound simulation and collision sound simulation. We synthesize vortex sound from moving objects by modeling air turbulences produced attributed to rapid object movements. In it, we precompute sounds determined by different velocity flows, and later use a lookup table scheme to retrieve the precomputed data for further synthesis. We also compute a modal model from prerecorded impact sounds to synthesize variations of collision sounds on the fly. Compared to using multiple prerecorded clips to provide sound variations, our system consumes less memory and can be further accelerated using SIMD instructions. Furthermore, we utilize OpenAL for fast hardware-accelerated propagation modeling of the synthesized sound. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.