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Splash, Splatter, Sploosh, and Bloop!

Acoustic Bubble writes "Researchers at Cornell University have developed the first algorithm for synthesizing familiar bubble-based fluid sounds automatically from 3D fluid simulations, e.g, for future virtual environments. The research (entitled 'Harmonic Fluids') will appear at ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans in August 2009. Check out some videos of falling, pouring, splashing and babbling water simulations (computed on a Linux cluster)."

27 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm. by Luke727 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Was I the only one who immediately thought of a cumshot upon reading the title?

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    1. Re:Hmm. by youn · · Score: 5, Funny

      I believe it's called the Splash-dot effect

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      Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p
    2. Re:Hmm. by beadfulthings · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm pretty stodgy. All I could think of was the Brownian motion poem:

      Big whorls have little whorls
      Which feed on their velocity.
      And little whorls have lesser whorls,
      And so on to viscosity...

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    3. Re:Hmm. by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Funny

      Aside from the oooohs and aaaahs, good sex sounds like "gluck, gluck, gluck...", like repeatedly slapping a filled-up douchebag against the sidewalk.

    4. Re:Hmm. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      "gluck, gluck, gluck" is the sound you hear when you repeatedly slap a filled-up douchebag against the sidewalk? Seriously?

      How about, "Ouch, ouch, ouch!"

    5. Re:Hmm. by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Funny

      Stuff that splatters?

    6. Re:Hmm. by Gleng · · Score: 4, Funny

      Stuff that splatters?

      News for turds?

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  2. Thanks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    now i gotta go pee...

  3. Graphical Adventures by Celeste+R · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a simulation physicist's wet dream, and I'm sure it'll be somewhere in a graphical adventure soon.

    My bet is that the FPS genre will like this too.

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    1. Re:Graphical Adventures by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 3, Informative

      From TFA, three single drops of water took one and a half hours to simulate. The babbling water simulation took over 12 hours.

    2. Re:Graphical Adventures by master5o1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm assuming that the simulation can then be used to add distortions. Say, water trickling down a creek, and ducks splashing. The two sounds would be distorted by both the direction they are coming from and the interaction of the two sounds. The idea would be to make the sounds more realistic without having to record every possible case.

      Mind you, I haven't yet read the article (or summary) and I am not a sound engineer of any sort.

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  4. How long until this is realtime? by Sowelu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I want a simulation program where I can move around rocks and pools and have a water hose. Used to do this all the time in the backyard as a kid, it would be nice to do it without getting wet or wasting water. Wonder how long until this is realtime? My kids, of course, won't get to play with it. They need to play in the REAL backyard.

    1. Re:How long until this is realtime? by sharkey · · Score: 2, Funny

      I want a simulation program where I can move around rocks and pools and have a water hose.

      We are going to flood the world, General Disarray! Muahahahaah!

      --

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  5. What we've all been waiting for by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finally bukakke (and less ... pleasant) hentai anime with realistic sound. Yay.

    What? What did YOU think this is for?

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  6. In other news... by youn · · Score: 4, Funny

    In other news from the overpriced useless ressearch dept... the research has found an unexpected application... generating fart sounds from facial expressions... thus giving speech to farts. a student called in for volunteer testing of the system said, "amazing! it actually sounds like me... I was always embarassed because my farts didnt make any sound... now I know wether it is a pzzzt or a plrrrrt or a puffff.... Thank you"

    Privacy right groups caution against wide use of the system, "We got to preserve the right to privacy while farting... imagine if these devices were everywhere? our privacy would be gone like the wind"

    --
    Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p
  7. The simulation sounded muffled. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The simulation sounded somewhat muffled, like the high frequency components weren't right or weren't of sufficient amplitude.

    Can some of the rest of you listen and tell me if it sounds muffled to you too? (I want to be sure it's not my machine or earphones.)

    Might be the CODEC used with flash rather than the original simulation itself...

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    1. Re:The simulation sounded muffled. by Carnildo · · Score: 4, Informative

      The effect reminds me strongly of the water sounds in Myst. I think it's an artefact of recording flowing water in isolation: without an environment to reflect the sounds, the frequency mix isn't right.

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      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    2. Re:The simulation sounded muffled. by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, I agree. In all honesty the sounds are about as good as the animations. Recognizable, but clearly not real. I think they would have done better if they had just gotten a microphone and sampled some real water.

      On the other hand, maybe someone with a good ear can come along and adjust the algorithms until they really DO sound good. Much like computer visual art isn't all that great unless someone with artistic talent is deploying it.

      --
      Qxe4
    3. Re:The simulation sounded muffled. by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The effect reminds me strongly of the water sounds in Myst. I think it's an artefact of recording flowing water in isolation: without an environment to reflect the sounds, the frequency mix isn't right.

      The reflections make a huge difference to the sound, and probably a huge difference in processing time too. This simulation + an environment around the source + surround sound (eg binaural processing, for us folks with earphones) would be very cool indeed.

      Can we do audio-tracing on a GPU yet?

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    4. Re:The simulation sounded muffled. by ephraimX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Er... You're kind of missing the point, I think, which is that it's really neat to be able to get it that good entirely by synthesis. Without doing any sampling.

  8. What is going on here? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's WOULD. And ONOMATOPOEIA.

    I want a refund!

  9. Re:Can they by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think you understand the word simulation. It's all computer-modelled; you can't take a picture of some plasma and expect the computer to simulate it.

  10. Re:Finally! by fractoid · · Score: 2, Funny

    Generic algorithms are only really useful if you want to model evorution. :P

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  11. I've been waiting for this for years by MattMooreSucks · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've been thinking about this type of thing for a while now - getting to a more basic level of sound reproduction, like we've been doing the last few years with graphics. Compare this to lighting in the Quake era, compared to today. Before, we had pre-rendered lighting in the .bsp, or worse (painting it on the texture). Now's it's simulated at a more basic (read: realistic) level, like a lower level emulator, with real-time lighting. And just as Doom 3's lighting was innovative but not terribly practical for many uses, so is this beginning of low-level synthesized sound. I hope we make large strides at both. For the record, this is my first (evar) post on slashdot. After reading for years. How do I line-break exactly?

  12. Am I the only one... by hedleyroos · · Score: 2, Funny

    who thought that those are the names of new social networking sites?

  13. Procedural generation by ledow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Looks like PC gaming is likely to be heading more and more towards procedural generation of the universe. Real-time shadows, dynamic lighting and now, dynamic sounds.

    It'll all make it more realistic (but at a high CPU cost!) - being able to not have "splish, splosh, splish, splosh" when wading through water but a full-on sound relative to individual parts - bullet shells, limbs, objects in the water, etc. We won't see it *practically* for years, but gaming is getting closer and closer to that dream of "virtual reality", where you won't be able to tell the difference between a real scene and a computer generated one without touching it.

    I think you can make uses of it in gaming too, extending the basic science to a consumer level - skim stones across water that sound like they're being skimmed (and with proper fluid physics similar to that which we already have, individual sploshes and waves etc. affecting that stone) - or be able to throw a coin into water behind an enemy and see if you can use it to distract him. Maybe even, the bubbles that you breath underwater hitting the surface with their true sounds, thus giving your position away if you were hoping that holding your breath would let that enemy walk past you without hearing you.

    When you play games, you don't notice the "cheats" at first - the static sounds that just play on certain events, the pre-lit textures, the echoing of sounds generated inside a certain fixed area. Even in things like HL2, boxes thrown into water either splosh or don't, splosh based on certain primitive criteria that provide a few levels of believability. But as new technology comes along to make it possible to actually *create* that effect rather than script it, everything suddenly feels much more alive.

    Dynamic sound has to be one of the next "big" areas - hitting a wall with an axe in a game used to give "Doink", then it gave a selection of "Doink, Donk, Doink, Donk" sounds each time. Moving forwards, the only way is to actually determine exact angles, shapes of the wall (proper destructible objects for everything are, sadly, still only a dream) and to generate a simulation of the sound it would produce (how cool would it be that if you strike the axe slightly off, you get a reverberating axe coming back at you, with a horrible sound that tells you not to do it?. Maybe even with the axe breaking on a critical point if you mis-use it too much, e.g. try and chop at a steel wall).

    We already have proper echoing and other effects available and 7.1 surround can take away the whole "Where the hell did that come from?" effect if it's too clinically applied. But having sounds *generated* by the interactions within an environment... wow. Imagine Left4Dead-style atmosphere, but with proper echo effects... you walk towards a corner and from around it, a zombie stumbles into a puddle - suddenly the sound not only tells you there's something near, but the echoes from the corners confuse just as in real life, and the sound is only the tiniest little splish, and it may even be possible to determine the *type* of zombie around the corner by the type of splash it makes - something with a large flat foot would create an enormous popping bubble of a sound, something with stick-like appendages would generate barely a ripple.

    This will have a small but critical effect on gaming and, I imagine, a million other uses. But we're *years* away from seeing it used.

  14. Yes but... by IceCreamGuy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Check out some videos of falling, pouring, splashing and babbling water simulations. (computed on a Linux cluster).

    Yes but does it run on a beow... oh. Sweet.