Dr. Ming Lin has been working on realtime physics simulations before physics engines were cool. Ming is now actively researching how to simulate audio in real-time. Rather than recording or generating sounds that are then simulated within a virtual environment, Dr. Ming and her students are pioneering methods for “coupling sound synthesis with sound propagation to automatically generate realistic aural content for virtual environments.” She’s also using machine learning techniques to be able to extract the material properties of the environment from a sound recording.
I had a chance to catch up with Ming after she presented some of her SynCoPation techniques as a part of her keynote at the IEEE VR academic conference in March. You can read more about some of her virtual sound simulation work in the “Interactive Sound Rendering” section of her vast amount of VR-related research.