Etienne Richan

2papers

2 Papers

SDFeb 6
Reciprocal Latent Fields for Precomputed Sound Propagation

Hugo Seuté, Pranai Vasudev, Etienne Richan et al.

Realistic sound propagation is essential for immersion in a virtual scene, yet physically accurate wave-based simulations remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Wave coding methods address this limitation by precomputing and compressing impulse responses of a given scene into a set of scalar acoustic parameters, which can reach unmanageable sizes in large environments with many source-receiver pairs. We introduce Reciprocal Latent Fields (RLF), a memory-efficient framework for encoding and predicting these acoustic parameters. The RLF framework employs a volumetric grid of trainable latent embeddings decoded with a symmetric function, ensuring acoustic reciprocity. We study a variety of decoders and show that leveraging Riemannian metric learning leads to a better reproduction of acoustic phenomena in complex scenes. Experimental validation demonstrates that RLF maintains replication quality while reducing the memory footprint by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, a MUSHRA-like subjective listening test indicates that sound rendered via RLF is perceptually indistinguishable from ground-truth simulations.

HCNov 30, 2020
A proposal and evaluation of new timbre visualisation methods for audio sample browsers

Etienne Richan, Jean Rouat

Searching through vast libraries of sound samples can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Modern audio sample browsers use mappings between acoustic properties and visual attributes to visually differentiate displayed items. There are few studies focused on how well these mappings help users search for a specific sample. We propose new methods for generating textural labels and positioning samples based on perceptual representations of timbre. We perform a series of studies to evaluate the benefits of using shape, color or texture as labels in a known-item search task. We describe the motivation and implementation of the study, and present an in-depth analysis of results. We find that shape significantly improves task performance, while color and texture have little effect. We also compare results between in-person and online participants and propose research directions for further studies.