A Unified Time-Frequency Method for Synthesizing Noisy Sounds with Short Transients and Narrow Spectral Components
Authors: Marelli D., Aramaki M., Kronland-Martinet R., Verron C.
Publication Date: March 2010
Journal: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, USA, 14-19 March 2010 (pp. 29-32)
Abstract
The inverse FFT method was proposed to alleviate the complexity of the additive sound synthesis method in real time applications, and consists in synthesizing overlapping blocks of samples in the frequency domain. However, its application is limited by its inherent trade-off between time and frequency resolution. In this paper we propose an alternative method for overcoming this limitation. The proposed method generates time-frequency noise with an auto-correlation function such that the sound obtained after converting it to time domain has the desired time-varying power spectral density. We present synthesis examples illustrating the simultaneously good time and frequency resolution of the proposed method and study its complexity.
Sound examples illustrating the paper
Synthesis using time-frequency domain (TFD) and time-domain (TD) methods. The synthesis parameters have been obtained with different methods (spectral analysis of real sounds, physical models, heuristics, …).
Solid sounds
| TFD Synthesis method | TD Synthesis method | |
| Glass impact | ||
| Wood impact | ||
| Metal impact | ||
| Rockfall | ||
| Stones crumbling |
Liquid sounds
| TFD Synthesis method | TD Synthesis method | |
| Wave 1 | ||
| Wave 2 | ||
| Drops |
Aerodynamic sounds
| TFD Synthesis method | TD Synthesis method | |
| Swishing stick | ||
| Rotating swishing stick | ||
| Crackling fire | ||
| Wind 1 | ||
| Wind 2 |
Relative square error between the TFD and TD methods for each sound
| Sound category | Sound | Relative square error (dB) |
| Solid | Glass impact | -27.12 |
| Wood impact | -12.11 | |
| Metal impact | -23.80 | |
| Rockfall | -4.41 | |
| Stones crumbling | -16.59 | |
| Liquid | Wave1 | -34.10 |
| Wave2 | -34.08 | |
| Drops | -7.03 | |
| Aerodynamic | Swishing stick | -32.48 |
| Rotating swishing stick | -34.14 | |
| Crackling fire | -17.87 | |
| Wind 1 | -34.03 | |
| Wind 2 | -34.29 |