Audio Texture Synthesis for Complex Contact Interactions

This paper presents a new synthesis approach for generating contact sounds for interactive simulations. To address complex contact sounds, surface texturing is introduced. Visual textures of objects in the environment are reused as a discontinuity map to create audible position-dependent variations during continuous contacts. The resulting synthetic profiles are then used in real time to provide an excitation force to a modal resonance model of the sounding objects. Compared to previous sound synthesis for virtual environments, our approach has three major advantages: (1) complex contact interactions are addressed and a large variety of sounding events can be rendered, (2) it is fast due to the compact form of the solution which allows for synthesizing at interactive rates, (3) it provides several levels of detail which can be used depending on the desired precision.