Synthesizing the Sound of Cloth, Garments & Fabrics

Motion-driven Concatenative Synthesis of Cloth Sounds (SIGGRAPH 2012)

Published on Jun 19, 2012 by DougLJames

Clothing sounds synthesized using the approach from our SIGGRAPH 2012 paper, and PhD thesis work by Steven S. An.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/Sound/cloth/

Steven S. An , Doug L. James, and Steve Marschner, Motion-driven Concatenative Synthesis of Cloth Sounds, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), August 2012.

Abstract: We present a practical data-driven method for automatically synthesizing plausible soundtracks for physics-based cloth animations running at graphics rates. Given a cloth animation, we analyze the deformations and use motion events to drive crumpling and friction sound models estimated from cloth measurements. We synthesize a low-quality sound signal, which is then used as a target signal for a concatenative sound synthesis (CSS) process. CSS selects a sequence of microsound units, very short segments, from a database of recorded cloth sounds, which best match the synthesized target sound in a low-dimensional feature-space after applying a hand-tuned warping function. The selected microsound units are con- catenated together to produce the final cloth sound with minimal filtering. Our approach avoids expensive physics-based synthesis of cloth sound, instead relying on cloth recordings and our motion-driven CSS approach for realism. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a variety of cloth animations involving various materials and character motions, including first-person virtual clothing with binaural sound."

via Engadget

Precomputed Acceleration Noise for Improved Rigid-Body Sound (SIGGRAPH 2012)

Published on Jun 19, 2012 by DougLJames

"Acceleration noise sounds synthesized using the method from our SIGGRAPH 2012 paper.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/Sound/impact/

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

ABSTRACT: We introduce an efficient method for synthesizing acceleration noise--sound produced when an object experiences abrupt rigidbody 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."