Computer Graphics Researchers Simulate the Sounds of Water and Other Liquids

Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, according to researchers in Cornell’s Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images. The sounds produced by pouring and splashing water actually result from the vibration of trapped air bubbles. Cornell researchers can simulate those sounds by computing how the bubbles would behave. The work by Doug James, associate professor of computer science, and graduate student Changxi Zheng will be reported at the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference Aug. 3-7 in New Orleans. It is the first step in a broader research program on sound synthesis supported by a $1.2 million grant from the Human Centered Computing Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to James, assistant professor Kavita Bala and associate professor Steve Marschner