Physical Modeling of Impacts: Theory and Experiments on Contact Time and Spectral Centroid

A model for physically based synthesis of collision sounds is discussed. Attention is focused on the properties of the non-linear contact force, and on the influence of the physical parameters on the perceptually salient sound features. First, the dependence of the contact time on the force parameters is established analytically and validated through numerical simulations. Then, the relation with the time-varying spectral centroid is discussed. As a result, a mapping between the physical parameters of the impact force and the acoustic parameters of the impact sound is proposed.