# Is there an audio renderer?

I wanted to know if there is a sound render like the renderers of 3d modeling software (vray , cycles etc).

I would like to experiment with sound in a controlled environment

if it does not exist which is what makes it difficult to create an audio renderer?

• do you mean something that simulates a room? like you specify the geometry of a space and the renderer tells you what the reverberation sounds like? otherwise i just don't have the foggiest idea of what you mean.  what function does an "audio renderer" do? – robert bristow-johnson Dec 5 '18 at 23:21
• I refer to a simulator that simulates all the properties of sound (absorption, diffraction, reflection) as in real life. have a virtual speaker and a virtual listener and that the sound generated by the virtual speaker goes through the (absorption, diffraction, reflection, etc.) and reaches the listener and hear in my headphones. – jony alton Dec 5 '18 at 23:29
• i haven't understood "absorption, diffraction, and reflection" to be properties of sound. they are properties of spaces, structures, and devices that have an effect upon sound. – robert bristow-johnson Dec 6 '18 at 0:37

"Sound renderers" do exist, and some are very good: have a look at the research of Nikunj Raghuvanshi. For an introduction to their rendering method:

Nikunj Raghuvanshi, Rahul Narain and Ming C. Lin, Efficient and Accurate Sound Propagation Using Adaptive Rectangular Decomposition, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics(TVCG), 15(5), 2009.

Abstract:

Accurate sound rendering can add significant realism to complement visual display in interactive applications, as well as facilitate acoustic predictions for many engineering applications, like accurate acoustic analysis for architectural design. Numerical simulation can provide this realism most naturally by modeling the underlying physics of wave propagation. However, wave simulation has traditionally posed a tough computational challenge. In this paper, we present a technique which relies on an adaptive rectangular decomposition of 3D scenes to enable efficient and accurate simulation of sound propagation in complex virtual environments. It exploits the known analytical solution of the Wave Equation in rectangular domains, and utilizes efficient implementation of Discrete Cosine Transform on the GPU to achieve at least a hundred-fold performance gain compared to a standard Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) implementation with comparable accuracy, while also being an order of magnitude more memory-efficient. Consequently, we are able to perform accurate numerical acoustic simulation on large, complex scenes in the kilohertz range. To the best of our knowledge, it was not previously possible to perform such simulations on a desktop computer. Our work thus enables acoustic analysis on large scenes and auditory display for complex virtual environments on commodity hardware.

The paper has its own website. The manuscript version of the paper there is missing some prose, so preferably get the paper from the first link.

Siemens, for example, advertises acoustics simulation as part of their computer aided engineering solutions.

Graphics rendering is the process of projecting a three dimensional description of a simulated world of objects into a photographic plane (the viewport) which represents the observers capturing point in the world.

In an analogous manner, the process of calculating the acoustic sound pressure, that results from a simulated audio in a three dimensional world, at the specified positions of capturing microphones, can be called as audio rendering.

And this is the essence behind the 3D audio-fx in computer games for example.

Such a rendering inevitably requires the consideration of the room or space geometry and all sorts of reverberations, echoes, transmisisons, absorptions, shadows, etc.. in addition to many other effects that should be taken into account.

• i would think that such rendering also requires some knowledge about the listener, such as head-related transfer functions (HRTF), interaural spacing, and the position and facing orientation of the listener within the space geometry. – robert bristow-johnson Dec 6 '18 at 0:41
• @robertbristow-johnson alright then you are placing the mics into your ears ;-) – Fat32 Dec 6 '18 at 2:06