Computational acoustics and large scale sound synthesis on GPUs Seminar

Physical modelling sound synthesis and audio effects processing is concerned with the emulation (through simulation) of acoustic entities, ranging from standard acoustic musical instruments to room acoustics to analog electronic components and hybrid electromechanical systems, and finally virtual constructions without a real world counterpart. The goals are a) greatly increasing sound quality, b) offering simplified control, and c) allowing flexible new effect/instrument design exploration while retaining sound output with an acoustic character. In many respects it is analogous to similar developments in computer graphics, also based around increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques. In some regards, however, it represents a distinct challenge: among these are the large frequency range to which the ear is sensitive, requiring very small time steps in simulation, and the strongly nonlinear nature of even simple sound producing objects. Another major challenge is that of computational cost, particularly for systems in 3D, requiring HPC solutions using numerical designs constrained by the peculiarities of human audio perception. Sound examples and video demonstrations will be presented.