Interactive sound rendering

Extending the frontier of visual computing, sound rendering utilizes auditory display to communicate in-formation to a user and offers an alternative means of visualization. By harnessing the sense of hearing, sound rendering can further enhance a user’s expe-rience in a multimodal virtual world. In addition to immersive environments, auditory displays can provide a natural and intuitive human-computer interface for many desktop applications. In this paper, we give a brief overview of recent work at UNC Chapel Hill on fast algorithms for sound synthesis and sound propagation. These include physically-based sound synthesis for rigid bodies and liquid sound generation, as well as numeric and geometric algorithms for sound propagation. We highlight their performance on different benchmarks and briefly discuss some problems for future research. 1