[fizixer]

As a game-development/simulation enthusiast, I'm disappointed at the utter relative lack of interest in computer-generated acoustics (CGA?) compared to computer-generated imagery (CGI).

I hope CGA gets attention because there is a lot of work to be done before a fully synthetic world simulation could be realized.

[robmiller]

There is work being done in this. I saw some Microsoft demos during the 2011 Acoustical Society of America meeting in Seattle where they showed realtime room reverberation for characters as they move through rooms. There are some European universities working on this too. Sorry, I can't find any links at the moment. There is also some promise that GPUs will be able to handle some of the processing needed to do this quickly.

Consider the challenges with modelling acoustics. The audible spectrum spans from 2E1 to 2E4 Hz and those difference in wavelenghts make for different behaviors in rooms, not to mention the challenges of accurately modeling diffraction and diffusion. Computer modelling largely is still brute force, where rays are randomly drawn from a source in hopes of eventually finding a receiver's location in the room before reaching inaudibility. Recently some algorithms that were developed for computer graphics have been introduced in acoustics to make room reflections not brute force anymore. I've created an early implementation of this based on the work of another HNer, kabla. Realtime raytracer http://threedb.com/2d-viewer.php