A Montage Approach to Sound Texture Synthesis

Sound texture synthesis has applications in creating audio scenes for film and video games. In this paper, a novel algorithm for sound texture synthesis is presented. The goal of this algorithm is to produce new examples of a given sampled texture, the synthesized textures being of any desired duration. The algorithm is based on a montage approach to synthesis in that the original sample is cut into small pieces, referred to as atoms, and these atoms are concatenated together in a new sequence, preserving certain structures of the original texture. The sequence modelling of the atoms has two levels: atoms are concatenated to create segments and segments are concatenated, based on their history, to create textures. This approach deals with problems of repetition associated with sampling based sound texture synthesis techniques. Listening tests show that the results of the synthesis are very promising for a broad range of textures, including quasi-periodic and more random textures.