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)."

Re:The simulation sounded muffled.

[BiggerIsBetter]

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?

I've been waiting for this for years

[MattMooreSucks]

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?

Re:The simulation sounded muffled.

[ephraimX]

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.