Sounds of Shapes

Kees van den Doel ( kvdoel@cs.ubc.ca )

Audio Synthesis In Java

With the release of the latest browsers supporting Java 2, Netscape 6, InterNet Explorer 6 and Opera 5, it is finally possible to create high quality sound in Java in an Applet, using JavaSound. Unfortunately the old method of doing it, using the "sun.audio" classes, is no longer supported. So Applets that work in the old browsers will not work in the new ones and vice versa.

High quality (16 bit 44KHz) JavaSound demos for latest browsers:

The following applets work on Netscape 6 on Windows (not on Linux), Opera 5.11 on Windows, IE6, older versions of Netscape (Windows and Linux) and IE (Windows) when using the special Java 2 plug-in from Sun. I've heard rumours they also work on IE on Mac OS X. They are supposed to work on Netscape 6 on Linux with the Java 2 plugin, but I have not been able to get this working.

JASS Java Audio Synthesis System SDK. A synthesis SDK with many online demos.

Create your own object and scrape it, hit it, pluck it.

Play with a virtual bell tower and do some change ringing.

Low quality (8 bit 8Khz) audio demos for old browsers:

Create your own object and scrape it, hit it, pluck it.

Play with a virtual bell tower and do some change ringing.

Create avalanches and hear them. Also contains a tiny SDK based on the "sun.audio" classes, which is now obsolete, unless someone revives the sun.audio classes.

Other stuff:

See also here for recent work, video, papers, etc.

An early demo of my work on sound simulation with Dinesh K. Pai is the Sonic Explorer, which runs on Silicon Graphics machines. This demo allows you to hit objects in a virtual room as depicted here and hear the sounds this makes.

Since then we have created a number of cooler demos running on SGI, Windows, and Linux These demos synthesize a variety of sounds interactively in real time. Shown in the picture

is a pair of plastic toy swords which were equipped with force probes. The sounds they should make during a fight if they were real swords is computed and rendered in software.

The technical background of our work is explained in my PhD thesis ( download zipped postscript ) and also in in the following paper.

@article{DoelPai98,
	author = {Kees van den Doel and Dinesh K. Pai},
	title = {The Sounds of Physical Shapes},
	journal = {Presence},
	year = {1998},
	volume = {7},
	number = {4},
        pages = {382--395}}
(pdf)
Abstract

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