I know that nowadays there are some physics engines pretty advanced, capable of very complex simulations.
Are we at a point in technology where if, for example, we were to simulate a rock being dropped on the floor from a certain distance, the simulation can calculate the shape and weight of the rock , the air resistance experienced during the fall, the density of the floor where the rock will fall onto, and all the other thousands of factors involved, and from those things “calculate” the sound that the rock will make when hitting the floor, and then reproduce it?
Is there such a thing? Are we there yet? If not, is it something feasible?
Yes and no. As my physics professor used to say, all models are wrong, our goal is to make the least wrong model. It’s literally impossible to simulate every event. For example, what if there was an anthill under the area where the rock is dropped? Maybe that will affect the resulting sound? Maybe, but it’s not going to make a difference to the observer.
We know enough physics to simulate a huge number of simultaneous events, but at some point a model becomes far too complicated (e.g. taking a week to run on a powerful computer), when a more simplified model will do the trick just fine. I personally compare it to FLAC and MP3–FLAC is of course best quality, but will eat up a ton of storage space, and MP3 (with compression) is good enough
Not specifically for a rock, but that’s “roughly” how physical modeling synthesiers work for instruments.
Also there’s a youtube channel of a guy who builds an engine simulator to reproduce the sounds of 4-stroke and 2-stroke engines by applying fluid dynamic simulation of the gas flows in an engine.
It COULD conceivably be built for rock dropping as well, but I assume that’s not a thing people have yet put effort in.
Edit:
Maybe a rough/okay approximation but it is to my understanding that in order to perfectly simulate the universe and everything in it, we must first understand the entire system; which we have not.
We have made incredible advances in protein folding, I don’t see why sound waves wouldn’t be possible to estimate.
Do I know how to go about it? Not really, I imagine knowing the inside of the rock would be quite the feat, maybe X-ray crystallography to map out all the intricacies of the rock and such but you’re better off asking a sound engineer.
Any ideas gang?
What you can do, and is probably the best way to get this to work, is tackle this with machine learning. You will need lots sound samples of rocks, with details of the rock, and feed them to some (probably deep learning) model.
Speech mimicking with AI has shown we are able to mimick voices, so I think a similar approach would work for rocks. Probably need some tuning and a bit different architecture for nice results since the application differs a bit.
It will of course be an approximation, but that is any calculation. Since all models are wrong, but some are less wrong than others.
