Controlling Material Properties in Physical Models of Sounding Objects

Contact sounds can provide information for material perception, and according to previous studies decay seems to be one of the most important cues. This information can be used to tune a physical model to represent various materials. This work deals with a specific class of contact sounds, i.e. collision sounds. A hammer-resonator physical model is developed, and subjective experiments are performed in which listeneres are asked to indicate what material each synthesized sound is coming from. Experiments show that the model is able to convey information about material of the sound source.