2. Sound rendering pipeline

Once synthesized, the sound signals emitted by the virtual sources are then processed to reproduce the effects of sound propagation in the synthesis environment (occultation by obstacles, reflections off walls and reverberation, Doppler effect for moving sources). These effects are highly dependent on the geometry of the environment, the position of the sources and the listener. The processing carried out is therefore controlled by geometric calculations very similar to those used in image synthesis (ray-tracing, for example), but also has its own particularities, such as the treatment of sound diffraction by obstacles, which is generally negligible for light. For applications where the realism rather than the physical precision of the simulation is sufficient, perceptual models can also be used to describe the treatments to be applied to sounds without resorting to computationally time-consuming...