Animating fire with sound

Abstract

We propose a practical method for synthesizing plausible fire sounds that are synchronized with physically based fire animations. To enable synthesis of combustion sounds without incurring the cost of time-stepping fluid simulations at audio rates, we decompose our synthesis procedure into two components. First, a low-frequency flame sound is synthesized using a physically based combustion sound model driven with data from a visual flame simulation run at a relatively low temporal sampling rate. Second, we propose two bandwidth extension methods for synthesizing additional high-frequency flame sound content: (1) spectral bandwidth extension which synthesizes higher-frequency noise matching combustion sound spectra from theory and experiment; and (2) data-driven texture synthesis to synthesize high-frequency content based on input flame sound recordings. Various examples and comparisons are presented demonstrating plausible flame sounds, from small candle flames to large flame jets.