Abstract
The use of high quality sound effects is growing rapidly in multimedia, interactive and virtual reality applications. The common source of audio events in these applications is impact sounds. The sound effects in such environments can be pre-recorded or synthesized in real-time as a result of a physical event. However, one of the biggest problems when using pre-recorded sound effects is the monotonous repetition of these sounds which can be tedious to the listener. In this paper, we present a new algorithm which generates non-repetitive impact sound effects using parameters from the physical interaction. Our approach aims to use audio grains to create finely-controlled synthesized sounds which are based on recordings of impact sounds. The proposed algorithm can also be used in a large set of audio data analysis, representation, and compression applications. A subjective test was carried out to evaluate the perceptual quality of the synthesized sounds.