Improved Water Sound Synthesis using Coupled Bubbles

Abstract

We introduce a practical framework for synthesizing bubble-based water sounds that captures the rich inter-bubble coupling effects responsible for low-frequency acoustic emissions from bubble clouds. We propose coupled bubble oscillator models with regularized singularities, and techniques to reduce the computational cost of time stepping with dense, time-varying mass matrices. Airborne acoustic emissions are estimated using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods. We propose a simple, analytical surface acceleration model, and a sample-and-hold GPU wavesolver that is simple and faster than prior CPU wavesolvers. Sound synthesis results are demonstrated using bubbly flows from incompressible, two-phase simulations, as well as procedurally generated examples using single-phase FLIP fluid animations. Our results demonstrate sound simulations with hundreds of thousands of bubbles, and perceptually significant frequency transformations with fuller low-frequency content.

Citation

Kangrui Xue, Ryan M. Aronson, Jui-Hsien Wang, Timothy R. Langlois, Doug L. James. Improved Water Sound Synthesis using Coupled Bubbles. ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2023). Volume 42, Issue 4. August, 2023.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback, Pu Zhang for early experiments (ca. 2015), Cole Sohn for Houdini assistance, and Jiayi Eris Zhang for proof reading. We thank Adobe and Meta for academic support, SideFX for donating Houdini licenses for academic research, Maxon Redshift, and Intel and XSEDE for compute resources. This work was completed no thanks to a pandemic, two child births, a skateboard mishap, and too many deadline power outages. This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration under Award Number DE-NA0003968; and by the National Science Foundation (HCC-0905506) and Graduate Research Fellowships (DGE-1656518 & DGE-1144153). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or others.

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