Synthesis of environmental sounds in interactive multimodal systems

This review paper discusses the literature on perception and synthesis of environmental sounds. Relevant studies in ecological acoustics and multimodal perception are reviewed, and physically-based sound synthesis techniques for various families of environmental sounds are compared. Current research directions and open issues, including multimodal interfaces and virtal environments, automatic recognition and classification, and sound design, are discussed. The focus is especially on applications of physically-based techniques for synthesis of environmental sounds in interactive multimodal systems. The paper reports on ongoing research on bimodal (audio-haptic) rendering of virtual objects.