Interactive sound propagation using compact acoustic transfer operators

Abstract

We present an interactive sound propagation algorithm that can compute high orders of specular and diffuse reflections as well as edge diffractions in response to moving sound sources and a moving listener. Our formulation is based on a precomputed acoustic transfer operator, which we compactly represent using the Karhunen-Loeve transform. At runtime, we use a two-pass approach that combines acoustic radiance transfer with interactive ray tracing to compute early reflections as well as higher-order reflections and late reverberation. The overall approach allows accuracy to be traded off for improved performance at runtime, and has a low memory overhead. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on different scenarios, including an integration of our algorithm with Valve's Source game engine.