Audio Engineering Society Convention Paper Presented at the 129th Convention 2010 November 4–7 San Francisco, CA, USA The papers at this Convention have been selected on the basis of a submitted abstract and extended precis that have been peer reviewed by at least two qualified anonymous reviewers. This convention paper has been reproduced from the author’s advance manuscript, without editing, corrections, or consideration by the Review Board. The AES takes no responsibility for the contents. Additional papers may be obtained by sending request and remittance to Audio Engineering Society, 60 East 42 nd Street, New York, New York 10165-2520, USA; also see www.aes.org. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this paper, or any portion thereof, is not permitted without direct permission from the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Physical Modeling and Synthesis of Motor Noise for Replication of a Sound Effects Library Simon Hendry 1 and Josh Reiss 1 1 Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London Correspondence should be addressed to Simon Hendry (mail@simonhendry.co.uk) ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of objective tests exploring the concept of using a small number of physical models to create and replicate a large number of samples from a traditional sound effects library. The design of a DC motor model is presented and this model is used to create both a household drill and a small boat engine. The harmonic characteristics, as well as the spectral centroid were compared with the original samples and all the features agree to within 6.1%. The results of the tests are discussed with a heavy emphasis on realism and perceived accuracy and the parameters which have to be improved in order to humanise a model are explored. 1. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, sound effect libraries are comprised of many sampled sounds stored as uncompressed wave files. Due to the versatile nature of sound, an object may have up to 100 samples in the library associated with it. Each of these samples will differ very slightly in order to give the sound designer a wide variety of sounds to choose from. Despite the vast selection of samples available to sound designers today, it is often the case that the perfect sound is not found and the designer has to record his own effect. This leads both to valuable production time being wasted and sample libraries quickly becoming both very large in size and unorganised. Procedural audio is defined in [1] as a ’non-linear, often synthetic sound, created in real time accord- ing to a set of programmatic rules and live input’. Sound effects can be synthesised from a small num- ber of starting blocks, for example a random num- ber generator and sine wave generator, in much the 8218