Sound Synthesis, Propagation, and Rendering: A Survey

Abstract: Sound, as a crucial sensory channel, plays a vital role in improving the reality and immersiveness of a virtual environment, following only vision in importance. Sound can provide important clues such as sound directionality and spatial size. This paper gives a broad overview of research works on sound simulation in virtual reality, games, multimedia, computer-aided design. We first survey various sound synthesis methods, including harmonic synthesis, texture synthesis, spectral analysis, and physics-based synthesis. Then, we summarize popular sound propagation techniques, namely wave-based methods, geometric-based methods, and hybrid methods. Next, the sound rendering methods are reviewed. We further demonstrate the latest deep learning based sound simulation approaches. Finally, we point to some future directions of this field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive summary of sound research in the field of computer graphics.