Ask HN: "Blender" type program for Audio? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: "Blender" type program for Audio?

5 pointsEzGraphs9 comments

Blender allows users to describe 3D objects made of various materials and assign lighting and cameras to produce some sort of visual output. Is there any open source program that follows the same process related to sound wave? For instance, a modeled piano in a concert hall, where in place of cameras speaker outputs would "render" the sound in a given location.

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Audacity may have some filter effects that will do the trick, http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Some subtle use of echo would be the place to start.

You would need a recording of a piano to begin with which could be from a MIDI recording. I haven't used any but there is a good list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MIDI_editors_and_sequen...

Yeah Audacity seems to follow the traditional reverb and digital effects route. You choose a few parameters (frequency modulation, amount / time of delay) and a generic "room" is available to pass a sound signal through. There may be a way of getting more fine-grained with the inputs to exactly simulate a specific room, but this is not evident to me from looking at the docs.

Vienna MIR seems to do more or less what you're asking:

http://www.vsl.co.at/en/211/497/1687/2002/1691.htm

...though it's not open source. (I share it anyway, in the event it's helpful to someone here for whom being open source is not a hard requirement.)

There's a realtime programming language called 'Supercollider' designed for use with audio, and they have a facebook group. I'd ask this question there. Amongst all the devs involved, someone ought to know of something like what you're after.

That is really a fascinating project. Never heard of Supercollider before. If a "blender-for-audio" does not already exist, it looks like the sort of language that could be used to build an implementation.

Voxengo's Impulse Modeler sounds similar to what you're describing.

http://www.voxengo.com/product/imodeler/

This seems like the closest - from a UI perspective. The screen shot indicates the ability to design a room in 2D (rather than 3D). App appears to be windows only and closed source.

Had someone ask me this recently - and I talked around the actual question a bit. Sampling techniques for instance can provide similar results. Visual special effects are in constant demand (where physical scene creation can be expensive or dangerous) while most audio effects can be created cheaply and safely. Still, it is an interesting question - when you boil it down to physics, it's all just waves y'know :).

C-Sound and Pure-data may also be able to do this if you spend enough time learning their ins and outs.

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