VIRTUAL REALITY OF SOUND GENERATED FROM VIBRATING STRUCTURES

The advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology in cyberspace is amazing, but its development is mainly concentrated on the visual part. In this paper, the development of VR technology to produce sound based on the exact physics is studied. Our main concern is on the sound generated from vibrating structures. This may be useful, for example, in apprehending sound field characteristics of an aircraft cabin in design stage.To calculate sound pressure from curved surface of a structure, a new integration scheme is developed in boundary element method. Several example problems are solved to confirm our integration scheme. The pressure distributions on a uniformly driven sphere and cylinders are computed and compared with analytic solutions, and radiation efficiency of a vibrating plate under one-dimensional flow is also calculated. Also, to realize sound through computer simulation, two concepts, “structure-oriented analysis” and “human-oriented analysis”, are proposed. Using these concepts, virtual sound field of an aircraft cabin is created.