ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2018)

Gabriel Cirio, Ante Qu, George Drettakis, Eitan Grinspun, and Changxi Zheng

Paper
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Thin shells — solids that are thin in one dimension compared to the other two — often emit rich nonlinear sounds when struck. Strong excitations can even cause chaotic thin-shell vibrations, producing sounds whose energy spectrum diffuses from low to high frequencies over time — a phenomenon known as wave turbulence. It is all these nonlinearities that grant shells such as cymbals and gongs their characteristic “glinting” sound. Yet, simulation models that efficiently capture these sound effects remain elusive.

We propose a physically based, multi-scale reduced simulation method to synthesize nonlinear thin-shell sounds. We first split nonlinear vibrations into two scales, with a small low-frequency part simulated in a fully nonlinear way, and a high-frequency part containing many more modes approximated through time-varying linearization. This allows us to capture interesting nonlinearities in the shells’ deformation, tens of times faster than previous approaches. Furthermore, we propose a method that enriches simulated sounds with wave turbulent sound details through a phenomenological diffusion model in the frequency domain, and thereby sidestep the expensive simulation of chaotic high-frequency dynamics. We show several examples of our simulations, illustrating the efficiency and realism of our model.