His engine’s voice: towards a vocal sketching tool for synthetic engine sounds

We present a work in progress on a sound design tool for
automotive applications, which allows the designer to rapidly
prototype synthetic engine sounds through the use of
vocal imitations. A physics-based model for engine sound
synthesis, with real time parametric control based on timbral
descriptors extracted from the vocal signal, is under
development. This work can be considered as a preliminary
study in the larger context of the SkAT-VG EU project,
whose goal is to find ways to exploit and develop the use of
voice as a sketching and prototyping tool in sound design
practices.