Procedural Sound Generation for Soft Bodies in Video Games

Abstract

We propose a real-time, data-driven method to synthesize the sound of typical soft bodies (such as cloth and rope) in video games. For a given soft body, we perform a geometric analysis of its shape at each frame. These data are used to calculate a variety of motion events at run time that would produce sounds. We then record a database of sounds, which contains sequences of segmented sound units. Finally, we use a concatenative synthesis method to select and synthesize the actual soft-body sounds according to the extracted motion signals. Our approach is more computationally efficient compared to existing soft-body sound synthesis methods and is compatible with any particle-based soft-body physics in video games. We implement our method in Unreal Engine 4 and demonstrate its efficiency with several examples.