There's much more to say about this—especially about why we think these ideas are important to graphics. For more, see our paper arxiv.org/abs/2409.13507 or Matt's upcoming talk at SIGGRAPH Asia.

In the meantime, enjoy a video where every sound effect is a vocal imitation produced by our method! :)

We are interested in *vocal imitation*: how we use our voices to "sketch" and communicate real-world sounds (e.g. crow → "caw," bell → "dong"). It's effortless, intuitive, and we do it all the time.

Some of my favorite examples are from callers describing engine sounds on the radio show "Car Talk"…