We introduce an efficient method for synthesizing acceleration noise - sound produced when an object experiences abrupt rigid-body acceleration due to collisions or other contact events. We approach this in two main steps. First, we estimate continuous contact force profiles from rigid-body impulses using a simple model based on Hertz contact theory. Next, we compute solutions to the acoustic wave equation due to short acceleration pulses in each rigid-body degree of freedom. We introduce an efficient representation for these solutions - Precomputed Acceleration Noise - which allows us to accurately estimate sound due to arbitrary rigid-body accelerations. We find that the addition of acceleration noise significantly complements the standard modal sound algorithm, especially for small objects.

Paper | Citation | Video | Video (Youtube) | Source Code | Presentation Slides | Acknowledgements

Paper:

PrecomputedAccelerationNoise2012.pdf (PDF, 9MB)

Citation:

Jeffrey N. Chadwick, Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James, Precomputed Acceleration Noise for Improved Rigid-Body Sound, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), 31(4), August, 2012 (TeX)

Video:

Source Code:

Coming soon

SIGGRAPH 2012 Presentation:

Keynote slides (zipped, 77MB)

Acknowledgements:

The National Science Foundation (HCC-0905506)
The Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Intel (ISTC-VC)
Pixar
Autodesk
Vision Research

This research was conducted in conjunction with the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing.