Modal sound synthesis for interactive virtual environments

This thesis will present methods for sound synthesis for real-time application. In an initial study, the applicability and usability of synthesized vibration sounds will be examined for a virtual drilling task. The study shows that for the chosen scenario, realistic drilling sound can support interaction in a similar way to haptic vibrations, and can be utilized to compensate for a lack of haptic feedback. Modal Synthesis is a promising approach for an automatic synthesis of physically-based contact sounds from the geometry and material properties of scene objects. However, some limitations still restrict the applicability of modal synthesis, which will be addressed in this thesis. Synthesizing sounds in real-time can be a challenging problem. For this, Modal Synthesis is a promising approach that allows generating the contact of objects based on their physical properties. Modal Synthesis requires a Modal Analysis must be performed. This is a computationally expensive task and usually performed in a pre-processing step. In this thesis, approaches for the computation of a Modal Analysis at run-time will be proposed, which enable the use of Modal Synthesis for objects that cannot be analyzed upfront, e.g.\ because they are created interactively or are modified by the user. For this, the run-time requirements will be evaluated, and appropriate Levels-of-Detail approximations will be presented. When a Modal Analysis has been computed, the resulting modal data can be used to compute the vibration sound produced by an object. These vibrations are excited by forces acting on the object. At run-time, the Modal Synthesis has to evaluate the modal vibrations and apply the force excitation. While these computations can be performed on a CPU, this strongly limits the number and complexity of sounding objects and the forces acting on them. This thesis will present specialized algorithms to compute the Modal Synthesis with active forces on a graphics card, allowing for a high number of sounding objects