Physically based sound synthesis and control of jumping sounds on an elastic trampoline

This paper describes a system to interactively sonify the foot-floor contacts resulting from jumping on an elastic trampoline. The sonification was achieved by means of a synthesis engine based on physical models reproducing the sounds of jumping on several surface materials. The engine was controlled in real-time by pro- cessing the signal captured by a contact microphone which was attached to the membrane of the trampoline in order to detect each jump. A user study was conducted to evaluate the quality of the in- teractive sonification. Results proved the success of the proposed algorithms and their control. In addition, results provided indica- tions that the proposed auditory feedback can modulate the per- ception of the foot-haptic sensations of the surface utilized when jumping. The system can find application in augmented reality contexts for sport and entertainment, and is suitable for studies on multi-sensory perception involving the auditory and the foot- haptic modalities.