Dimitris Menexopoulos1, Pedro D. Pestana2, and Joshua D. Reiss1
1 Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
2 Science and Technology Department, The Open University of Portugal (UAb)
Procedural audio may be defined as real-time sound generation according to programmatic rules and live input. It is often considered a subset of sound synthesis and is especially applicable to nonlinear media, such as video games, virtual reality experiences and interactive audiovisual installations. However, there is resistance to widespread adoption of procedural audio because there is little awareness of the state of the art, including the diversity of sounds that may be generated, the controllability of procedural audio models and the quality of the sounds that it produces. We address all of these aspects in this review paper, while attempting a large scale categorisation of sounds that have been approached through procedural audio techniques. The role of recent advancements in neural audio synthesis, its current implementations, as well as potential future applications in the field are also discussed.
