Sound Synthesis for Impact Sounds in Video Games

We present an interactive system for synthesizing high quality, physically based audio on current video game consoles. From a recorded impact sound, we compute a modal model, which we use to synthesize variations of the sound on the fly. We show that for many sounds greater quality is obtained by using the amplitude envelopes of the extracted modes directly rather than fitting the envelopes to the standard exponential decay model. When combined with a residual, the synthesized sounds in most cases are indistinguishable from recorded clips. Compared to using multiple prerecorded clips to obtain variation, our system consumes less of the limited console memory. For sounds that are less amenable to modal synthesis, we introduce a simple filter that generates plausible variations from a single clip. Our system integrates easily with existing audio middleware and have been implemented in the Xbox360 game Crackdown II.

Presentation slides can be found here.