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Realtime GPU Audio
CowboyRobot writes "Two researchers at San Francisco State University has successfully implemented hardware acceleration for realtime audio using graphics processing units (GPUs). 'Suppose you are simulating a metallic plate to generate gong or cymbal-like sounds. By changing the surface area for the same object, you can generate sound corresponding to cymbals or gongs of different sizes. Using the same model, you may also vary the way in which you excite the metallic plate — to generate sounds that result from hitting the plate with a soft mallet, a hard drumstick, or from bowing. By changing these parameters, you may even simulate nonexistent materials or physically impossible geometries or excitation methods. There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao, uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found here). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.'"
What does it sound like when you strike a neutered cat with graphene carrots of varying length?
First post!
Now that this is out of the way, you carry on with actual comments about the topic.
It is not RESONANT frequency. It is RESONANCE frequency. When will you people LEARRRNNNN???????///slash
:)
Something to do with all those GPUs when ASIC mining of Bitcoin takes over. It's going to get noisy.
" simulate nonexistent materials or physically impossible geometries"
the sound of one hand clapping
Might be interesting to me, if it was ported to Linux and could use AMD GPUs! Mac and Nvidia,no way!
Yeah, you can do computationally heavy things in a GPU. We've done that for years. All this is saying is that some audio signal processing tasks are computationally heavy.
Two researchers at San Francisco State University has
*facepalm* Fucking illiterates, learn to read and write.
then we'll finally have the answer to "what is the sound of one hand clapping"
You should see 3d graphics done with my audio card.
What do they mean by "physically impossible geometries"? Are they talking about things that have a higher or lower number of physical dimensions (eg: a 4 dimensional object or a 2 dimensional object)? A weird combination of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry?
News at 11.
GPU audio processing makes hobbits late for dinner!
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One of the fundamental problems with computer based music production is that we're still, unless we're working with synthesized music, limited to pre-recorded samples.
Vienna Symphonic Library, for example, is well over several hundred gigabytes in size, many of those samples covering various articulations (playing techniques) of the same instrument.
One set of violins playing legato. One set of violins playing pizzicato. Marcato samples etc. etc. With virtual instruments that is no longer necessary. We can just "tell" the virtual musician where to place his fingers and how to do that and cconfigure a bunch of presets for the composer to use as he wishes.
One fundamental problem at the moment is dealing with smooth transitions from one note to another in sequence. For example the violas of a real orchestra playing a transition from one note to another would slide between them smoothly. This CAN be simulated by changing the note pitch digitally, but that loses authenticity.
VSL solves this by pre-recording the musicians playing the most common note transitions. This is a huge undertaking and takes up a lot of space as you have to record C to C#, C to D, C to D# etc. etc.
If we can simulate the instruments without relying on samples we can do away with all that and create some truly amazing things for musicians. I suspect that in the future we will have synthesized orchestration packages so that we can do away with samples entirely.
Those who play real instruments will be considered hipsters, music is seeing its final days, on the other side it's an awesome thing, I'm just sad for good music.
Please
I was thinking that it would be good for mapping out real "surround sound" similar to how complex reflection and/or ray-tracing is done.
Even if the initial sounds themselves are canned, the sound through a wooden hallway, a hallway with a carpet, or a large open room would be different. Combine that with digital surround and it could be quite useful.
There are many reasons that make GPU not as useful for audio.
The second is that most audio processing usually relies on complex directed graphs consisting on nodes that each process a different task, and that kind of interaction is too complex for the simpler, massively parallel GPU architecture.
It would be fanastic for us that work in the audio industry to have some sort of DSP acceleration coprocessors for audio, but there's not enough demand to make that affordable so we can only wait for GPUs to become more flexible and realtime friendly, or CPUs to become more parallel.
Maybe it was ADD N to (X) or Einsturzende Neubauten... or Human League (Mmmmm... Travelogue I LURV U)
Maybe it was Autobahn... maybe it was Metal Fingers in My Body, Nervous Gender, Storm the Studio or many more.
Maybe it was all the acid I did back in the 90's...
Just saying...
ANON!
"A sound is no more than a fart unless wrapped in meaning" - purrpurrpussy.
...perhaps it would be easier to visualize it? The frame buffer is just one bit-throw away...
4wdloop
I remember when sound cards accellerated sound processing. It wasn't that long ago. Now the processing has to be done on the video card?
Hopefully this means my old college buddy Marc can finally graduate. :p
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
At first I thought that post was a April fools from the submitted articles date - but this has actually been done before:
Fragment Shader Audio
and
Fragment Shader Audio with Delays
This is a much simpler implementation and is great for rapid real-time synthesizer development - and no messing around with compute shaders or openCL.
I can't wait until real-time synthesized voices escape the uncanny valley. Neal Stephenson was pretty prophetic in 'The Diamond Age' of having live voice actors behind dynamically scripted content; not that we have that, but that we still don't have good voice generators.
Voice 'acted' games without requiring actors to pre-record every possible phrase would be great.
DSPs have done sound modeling for years. So is the GPU the new DSP? Or is it simply cheaper because your desktop machine already has a GPU, whereas it may not have a DSP?
Everybody knows that. What are they teaching kids these days? SKINNER!
You should see 3d graphics done with my audio card.
Are you referring to Oscillofun? I thought that was interesting.
Isn't this basically what Roland's SuperNatural has been doing for years? I don't get it...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
you could bang an actual gong and join the rest of us in the real world.
The difficulty in synthesizing sound is getting the models right. You can't simulate each atom so you need a simplifying model that allows you to reduce the work. And that model has to be accurate in the areas where it matters.
While moving stuff to a GPU gives more computing power (but in a more constrained fashion than a CPU) and certainly helps, the models aren't there yet.
The people researching physical modelling continue to make progress, but I think that if you put state of the art in a game, you'd perhaps have more lively sounds, but they'd probably sound worse than sampled sounds.
Because if it's not, why should we care?
GPU processing for DSP is not news.