Synthesis of environmental sounds in multimedia applications

This paper presents work in progress on automatic generation of "environmental sounds" based on physical modelling. The increase in complexity of the Graphical User Interfaces and the expansion of Virtual Reality and multimedia applications has led to the necessity of using sound to ease the human computer interaction. This category of sounds can be used as non-speech audio presentation of objects and as interaction mechanisms to nonvisual interfaces. They occur in everyone s experience and exclude the necessity of previous special training. They are also very suggestive, permitting the meaningful mapping of events from the real world to computerrelated activities and are not annoying for the user.