Interactive Sound Rendering on Mobile Devices using Ray-Parameterized Reverberation Filters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, mobile-friendly sound rendering pipeline that combines ray-tracing and reverberation filters with spherical harmonic representation, enabling real-time spatial audio for interactive scenes on smartphones.

Contribution

It presents a novel unified spherical harmonic approach for efficient dynamic sound propagation and a pipeline that achieves high-quality audio with significantly improved speed on mobile devices.

Findings

Over an order of magnitude speedup compared to previous methods

Achieves plausible dynamic sound propagation on smartphones

Maintains high audio quality comparable to high-end convolution algorithms

Abstract

We present a new sound rendering pipeline that is able to generate plausible sound propagation effects for interactive dynamic scenes. Our approach combines ray-tracing-based sound propagation with reverberation filters using robust automatic reverb parameter estimation that is driven by impulse responses computed at a low sampling rate.We propose a unified spherical harmonic representation of directional sound in both the propagation and auralization modules and use this formulation to perform a constant number of convolution operations for any number of sound sources while rendering spatial audio. In comparison to previous geometric acoustic methods, we achieve a speedup of over an order of magnitude while delivering similar audio to high-quality convolution rendering algorithms. As a result, our approach is the first capable of rendering plausible dynamic sound propagation effects on commodity smartphones.