Auralization I: Vortex Sound Synthesis

Auralization is the process of extracting and displaying meaningful information in the form of sound from data. Through not only visualization but also auralization, users may achieve better understanding of the data, especially when multiple variables are visualized simultaneously. The main objective of this paper is to synthesize sound from 3D time-varying multivariable field data with distributed "turbulent " spots. Our technique takes a hybrid approach between parameter mapping and direct simulation. During preprocessing, acoustic strengths are computed at each spatial points at each time step. During interaction, users navigate within the volume space and audio frames are computed by integrating the acoustic radiations from the sound sources. A number of problems inherent in auralization and our solutions are discussed