Researchers Synthesize Real-Time Fracture Sounds

ChippedTeapot writes "Researchers at Cornell University have devised an algorithm for synthesizing sounds associated with brittle fracture simulations. Computers can now automatically generate synchronized sound, motion, and graphics for physically based fracture events, such as in future interactive virtual environments. The results will be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles July 25-29. Check out the smashing results on YouTube."

Comments

Uses?

[Reilaos]

From first thoughts and glancing at the article, it seems the first use that comes to mind is for sound effects in movies and the like. While it's great that you can not waste a perfectly good pot on a second-long sound effect, I'm wondering if there are any other implications.

Perhaps we can use this sort of things in reverse? Like "the audio from this emergency call indicates a lot of expensive china breaking! The china sounds like it is from midway through the Ming Dynasty! There's only one place in town that sell that! BS CSI TO THE RESCUE!"

Re:Uses?

[pinkj]

As a post-audio SFX editor/designer, I would LOVE to have a virtual room full of junk to throw around, bang, break, bend, etc. Having convincing sounds is very nice, but even sounds that are not 100% accurate can still be used for very creative purposes. I love the work these guys are doing. This is another video of theirs I saved last year from an article submitted here but didn't make it to the main page:

Harmonic Shells

Re:Uses?

[wagnerrp]

From first thoughts and glancing at the article, it seems the first use that comes to mind is for sound effects in movies and the like.

Generating realistic sounds of rigid objects is fairly straight forward. You know the material properties. You know the size and shape from your physics engine. You run it through some relatively simple set of equations to get the resonance frequency of the shard. Add in amplitude from the impact, natural damping over time, and you're done. Oh, but you have to do it for hundreds or thousands of objects, and each of those is impacting or fragmenting several times per second.

Producing realistic sound like that isn't very impressive. What is noteworthy is the optimization, generalization, and statistical modeling that they used to simplify that massive amount of computation into something that could be run in real-time on commodity hardware, rather than having to be backed by a supercomputer. Movie and special effects studios have those supercomputers and render farms at their disposal already. This work is intended to go hand and hand with the realistic and complex physics engines that games have started getting in the past few years.

Re:Uses?

[chichilalescu]

for me, as a physicist, it's fascinating that they were able to do it. the human brain is a great tool to test how "natural" various simulations are, and when you succeed in fooling it, it means your model is very close to reality in a certain way.
in the study of complex phenomena, any ability to model is an important insight, because we don't have the math to understand what's happening just by using first principles.

as a sidenote, the problem of turbulence was well-known before the revolution of quantum and relativistic physics; still, Kolmogorov's scaling law (one of the most important results in turbulence) came in the 1940s. these problems are hard, and I will take my hat off to anyone who is able to cheaply reproduce aspects of nonlinear phenomena.

Re:Uses?

[nebaz]

I think it depends on what people are accustomed to. Do silencers really work on guns as silently as shown in the movies? Or do punches really have the big "phwak" sound that you hear there? People are only good at determining "natural" sounds compared to what they are used to. They may not be realistic though.

Re:Uses?

[davester666]

Next up...fingernails on chalkboards!

Because we care.

Re:Uses?

[Vintermann]

Or do punches really have the big "phwak" sound that you hear there?

I've heard rumors that the common punching sound is actually a wrench smashing a cabbage.

Movies?

[garyisabusyguy]

Not so much, there are entire ranks of Foleys who work under union rules to deliver most movie sound effects (although they probably have impressive Sound Engineer titles now).

This is much more likely aimed at environments like video games and battle-ground simulations, where any number of events can occur and the presence of a tightly aligned sound track is needed to produce a more realistic effect.

The sequences of events in movies are pretty tightly controlled, so I see this as having less use there

Re:Movies?

[Monkeedude1212]

Not to mention that games are designed to be flexible in what can happen with them now. Force Unleashed would be an example where glass or wood can shatter differently almost everytime, depending on even the slightest nuances. For something like this - it's difficult to asssing premade sound effects - you can record various ones for big, medum, and small fracturing, but you run the risk of exploding your game filesize by adding more sound effects, or you are leaving the sounds a little bland as they will get repeated many times.

So for games, and other simulations, this kind of thing works well.

Cool demo...

[RevWaldo]

but they left out the cricket-bat-vs-femur sound comparison. This will be used in video games after all.

.

Re:Cool demo...

[Tisha_AH]

Or the cricket bat vs lemur.

Re:Just Use Samples

[Tejin]

Samples are terrible. It's like saying "Just use rectangles" to display objects in the game.

In old video games where the graphics and physics were also the equivalent of samples, it was okay to have sampled sound, but so much work has been poured into graphics and physics these days and everyone has ignored sound. I'm sure a lot of the work that went into making more realistic physics can be used in making better sounds, since material properties, velocities and angle of impact are important to both sound and physics.

It's a terrible immersion-breaker when you hear the same sample every time you hit something in game, regardless of whether it should have sounded like that.

Missed opportunity

[Locke2005]

Shouldn't this have been titled Breaking News?