Visually Indicated Sounds

Objects make distinctive sounds when they are hit or scratched. These sounds reveal aspects of an object's material properties, as well as the actions that produced them. In this paper, we propose the task of predicting what sound an object makes when struck as a way of studying physical intera...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Isola, Phillip, McDermott, Josh, Adelson, Edward H., Freeman, William T., Torralba, Antonio, Owens, Andrew Hale
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112659
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4915-0256
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9020-9593
Description
Summary:Objects make distinctive sounds when they are hit or scratched. These sounds reveal aspects of an object's material properties, as well as the actions that produced them. In this paper, we propose the task of predicting what sound an object makes when struck as a way of studying physical interactions within a visual scene. We present an algorithm that synthesizes sound from silent videos of people hitting and scratching objects with a drumstick. This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions.