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Automatic synthesis of explosion sound synchronized with animation

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Abstract

Sound is an essential element for enhancing the realness of virtual world. Currently, there are some remarkable works on the synthesis of fluid sound, such as fire and water. However, little attention has been paid to synthesizing explosion sound. This paper proposes an automatic method for synthesizing explosion sounds that are synchronized with the visual phenomena of explosion animations, including fireball generation and flame combustion. Such two types of visual animation correspond to two types of sound, which we name as explosive sound and combustion noise, respectively. For the synthesis of explosive sound, firstly, the occurrence time and duration of explosion sound are determined according to the dynamic process of fuel consumption, and then, the corresponding explosive sound is extracted from the recording examples according to the high-frequency content. For the combustion noise, we propose a synthesis method of combustion noise on the basis of the timbre similarity between sound examples and low-frequency combustion noise generated by a physical method. Finally, the two types of sound are blended respecting the occurrence and duration of the explosions and combustions parts detected in the visual stream. Our experiments and the user study show the results of our method and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61672375 and 61170118).

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Correspondence to Shiguang Liu.

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Liu, S., Gao, S. Automatic synthesis of explosion sound synchronized with animation. Virtual Reality 24, 469–481 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-019-00408-7

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