Physics-based sound synthesis is an increasingly popular technique in computer graphics to automatically generate realistic sounds associated to (otherwise silent) visual events, such as a spolling green plastic bowl or a dripping faucet. Previous work has shown very promising results; however, these algorithms still suffer from several shortcomings, such as long precomputation time or difficult integration for complex sound sources. In this thesis, we explore new simulation frameworks that leverage time-domain methods and insights to improve both the quality and speed of physics-based sound synthesis algorithms. First, we introduce KleinPAT, a new time-domain algorithm that rapidly estimates acoustic transfer fields of a vibrating rigid object (modeled by the linear modal model). Instead of estimating the transfer fields by (sequentially) solving the frequency-domain Helmholtz equations, our method partitions all vibration modes into chords using optimal mode conflation, performs a single time-domain wave simulation for each chord, and then separates the per-mode transfer fields using a deconflation solver. We show that our method achieves thousand-fold speedup compared to the more traditional fast boundary element methods, and maintains accuracy suitable for sound synthesis. Second, we present an integrated time-domain acoustic wavesolver to support sound rendering of a wide variety of physics-based simulation models and computer animated phenomena. We target high-quality offline rendering, and introduce methods including a sharp-interface boundary handling method, the acoustic shaders abstraction to integrate various sound sources, and a parallel-in-time synthesis algorithm for this task. We demonstrate the generality and quality of the solver by rendering sound sources of dynamic, multi-physics nature, such as vibrating solids, thin shells, water, and character. Finally, we will switch gears and introduce a new method to enrich standard rigid-body impact models with spatially varying coefficient of restitution maps, or Bounce Maps. We demonstrate that the commonly accepted hypothesis of constant restitution value per object is wildly incorrect, and propose a fast precomputation algorithm to sample and compute it. The resulting Bounce Maps can be queried in negligible time and can be used easily to enhance existing solvers. Although it is not directly related to sound synthesis, we will show that a dominant factor for varying restitution responses is the post-impact vibrations, which can cause sound.

Digital sound synthesis has long been approached using standard digital filtering techniques. Newer synthesis strategies, however, make use of physical descriptions of musical instruments, and allow for much more realistic and complex sound production and thereby synthesis becomes a problem of simulation. This book has a special focus on time domain finite difference methods presented within an audio framework. It covers time series and difference operators, and basic tools for the construction and analysis of finite difference schemes, including frequency-domain and energy-based methods, with special attention paid to problems inherent to sound synthesis. Various basic lumped systems and excitation mechanisms are covered, followed by a look at the 1D wave equation, linear bar and string vibration, acoustic tube modelling, and linear membrane and plate vibration. Various advanced topics, such as the nonlinear vibration of strings and plates, are given an elaborate treatment. Key features: Includes a historical overview of digital sound synthesis techniques, highlighting the links between the various physical modelling methodologies. A pedagogical presentation containing over 150 problems and programming exercises, and numerous figures and diagrams, and code fragments in the MATLAB® programming language helps the reader with limited experience of numerical methods reach an understanding of this subject. Offers a complete treatment of all of the major families of musical instruments, including certain audio effects. Numerical Sound Synthesis is suitable for audio and software engineers, and researchers in digital audio, sound synthesis and more general musical acoustics. Graduate students in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering or computer science, working on the more technical side of digital audio and sound synthesis, will also find this book of interest.

This book considers signal processing and physical modeling meth ods for sound synthesis. Such methods are useful for example in mu sic synthesizers, computer sound cards, and computer games. Physical modeling synthesis has been commercialized for the first time about 10 years ago. Recently, it has been one of the most active research topics in musical acoustics and computer music. The authors of this book, Dr. Lutz Trautmann and Dr. Rudolf Rabenstein, are active researchers and inventors in the field of sound synthesis. Together they have developed a new synthesis technique, called the functional transformation method, which can be used for pro ducing musical sound in real time. Before this book, they have published over 20 papers on the topic in journals and conference proceedings. In this excellent textbook, the results are combined in a single volume. I believe that this will be considered an important step forward for the whole community.

This book gives a broad overview of research on sound simulation driven by a variety of applications. Vibrating objects produce sound, which then propagates through a medium such as air or water before finally being heard by a listener. As a crucial sensory channel, sound plays a vital role in many applications. There is a well-established research community in acoustics that has studied the problems related to sound simulation for six decades. Some of the earliest work was motivated by the design of concert halls, theaters, or lecture rooms with good acoustic characteristics. These problems also have been investigated in other applications, including noise control and sound design for urban planning, building construction, and automotive applications. Moreover, plausible or realistic sound effects can improve the sense of presence in a virtual environment or a game. In these applications, sound can provide important clues such as source directionality and spatial size. The book first surveys various sound synthesis methods, including harmonic synthesis, texture synthesis, spectral analysis, and physics-based synthesis. Next, it provides an overview of sound propagation techniques, including wave-based methods, geometric-based methods, and hybrid methods. The book also summarizes various techniques for sound rendering. Finally, it surveys some recent trends, including the use of machine learning methods to accelerate sound simulation and the use of sound simulation techniques for other applications such as speech recognition, source localization, and computer-aided design.

This book gives a broad overview of research on sound simulation driven by a variety of applications. Vibrating objects produce sound, which then propagates through a medium such as air or water before finally being heard by a listener. As a crucial sensory channel, sound plays a vital role in many applications. There is a well-established research community in acoustics that has studied the problems related to sound simulation for six decades. Some of the earliest work was motivated by the design of concert halls, theaters, or lecture rooms with good acoustic characteristics. These problems also have been investigated in other applications, including noise control and sound design for urban planning, building construction, and automotive applications. Moreover, plausible or realistic sound effects can improve the sense of presence in a virtual environment or a game. In these applications, sound can provide important clues such as source directionality and spatial size. The book first surveys various sound synthesis methods, including harmonic synthesis, texture synthesis, spectral analysis, and physics-based synthesis. Next, it provides an overview of sound propagation techniques, including wave-based methods, geometric-based methods, and hybrid methods. The book also summarizes various techniques for sound rendering. Finally, it surveys some recent trends, including the use of machine learning methods to accelerate sound simulation and the use of sound simulation techniques for other applications such as speech recognition, source localization, and computer-aided design.

Virtual environments such as games and animated and "real" movies require realistic sound effects that can be integrated by computer synthesis. The book emphasizes physical modeling of sound and focuses on real-world interactive sound effects. It is intended for game developers, graphics programmers, developers of virtual reality systems and traini

The real world is full of sounds: a babbling brook winding through a tranquil forest, an agitated shopping cart plugging down a flight of stairs, or a falling piggybank breaking on the ground. Unfortunately virtual worlds simulated by current simulation algorithms are still inherently silent. Sounds are added as afterthoughts, often using "canned sounds" which have little to do with the animated geometry and physics. While recent decades have seen dramatic success of 3D computer animation, our brain still expects a full spectrum of sensations. The lack of realistic sound rendering methods will continue to cripple our ability to enable highly interactive and realistic virtual experiences as computers become faster. This dissertation presents a family of algorithms for procedural sound synthesis for computer animation. These algorithms are built on physics-based simulation methods for computer graphics, simulating both the object vibrations for sound sources and sound propagation in virtual environments. These approaches make it feasible to automatically generate realistic sounds synchronized with animated dynamics. Our first contribution is a physically based algorithm for synthesizing sounds synchronized with brittle fracture animations. Extending time-varying rigid-body sound models, this method first resolves near-audio-rate fracture events using a fast quasistatic elastic stress solver, and then estimates fracture patterns and resulting fracture impulses using an energy-based model. To make it practical for a large number of fracture debris, we exploit human perceptual ambiguity when synthesizing sounds from many objects, and propose to use pre-computed sound proxies for reduced cost of sound-model generation. We then introduce a contact sound model for improved sound quality. This method captures very detailed non-rigid sound phenomena by resolving modal vibrations in both collision and frictional contact processing stages, thereby producing contact sounds with much richer audible details such as micro-collisions and chattering. This algorithm is practical, enabled by a novel asynchronous integrator with model-level adaptivity built into a frictional contact solver. Our third contribution focuses on another major type of sound phenomena, fluid sounds. We propose a practical method for automatic synthesis of bubblebased fluid sounds from fluid animations. This method first acoustically augments existing incompressible fluid solvers with particle-based models for bubble creation, vibration, and advection. To model sound propagation in both fluid and air domain, we weight each single-bubble sound by its bubble-to-ear acoustic transfer function value, which is modeled as a discrete Green's function of the Helmholtz equation. A fast dual-domain multipole boundary-integral solver is introduced for hundreds of thousands of Helmholtz solves in a typical babbling fluid simulation. Finally, we switch gear and present a fast self-collision detection method for deforming triangle meshes. This method can accelerate deformable simulations and lead to faster sound synthesis of deformable phenomena. Inspired by a simple idea that a mesh cannot self collide unless it deforms enough, this method supports arbitrary mesh deformations while still being fast. Given a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) for a triangle mesh, we operate on bounding-volume-related submeshes, and precompute Energy-based Self- Collision Culling (ESCC) certificates, which indicate the amount of deformation energy required for the submesh to self collide. After updating energy values at runtime, many bounding-volume self-collision queries can be culled using the ESCC certificates. We propose an affine-frame Laplacian-based energy definition which sports a highly optimized certificate preprocess and fast runtime energy evaluation.

Since the 1950s, Sound and Music Computing (SMC) research has had a profound impact on the development of culture and technology in our post-industrial society. SMC research approaches the whole sound and music communication chain from a multidisciplinary point of view. By combining scientific, technological and artistic methodologies it aims at understanding, modeling, representing and producing sound and music using computational approaches. This book, by describing the state of the art in SMC research, gives hints of future developments, whose general purpose will be to bridge the semantic gap, the hiatus that currently separates sound from sense and sense from sound.

The two volume set LNCS 6938 and LNCS 6939 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2011, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA, in September 2011. The 68 revised full papers and 46 poster papers presented together with 30 papers in the special tracks were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 240 submissions. The papers of part I (LNCS 6938) are organized in computational bioimaging, computer graphics, motion and tracking, segmentation, visualization; mapping modeling and surface reconstruction, biomedical imaging, computer graphics, interactive visualization in novel and heterogeneous display environments, object detection and recognition. Part II (LNCS 6939) comprises topics such as immersive visualization, applications, object detection and recognition, virtual reality, and best practices in teaching visual computing.

This unique reference book offers a holistic description of the multifaceted field of systematic musicology, which is the study of music, its production and perception, and its cultural, historical and philosophical background. The seven sections reflect the main topics in this interdisciplinary subject. The first two parts discuss musical acoustics and signal processing, comprehensively describing the mathematical and physical fundamentals of musical sound generation and propagation. The complex interplay of physiology and psychology involved in sound and music perception is covered in the following sections, with a particular focus on psychoacoustics and the recently evolved research on embodied music cognition. In addition, a huge variety of technical applications for professional training, music composition and consumer electronics are presented. A section on music ethnology completes this comprehensive handbook. Music theory and philosophy of music are imbedded throughout. Carefully edited and written by internationally respected experts, it is an invaluable reference resource for professionals and graduate students alike.