Acoustic Reliefs

1ETH Zürich 2Stanford University
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Siggraph Asia 2025)

Abstract

We present a framework to optimize and generate Acoustic Reliefs: Acoustic diffusers that not only perform well acoustically in scattering sound uniformly in all directions, but are also visually interesting and can approximate user-provided images. To this end, we develop a differentiable acoustics simulator based on the boundary element method, and integrate it with a differentiable renderer coupled with a vision model to jointly optimize for acoustics, appearance, and fabrication constraints at the same time. We generate various examples and fabricate two room-scale reliefs. The result is a validated simulation and optimization scheme for generating acoustic reliefs whose appearances can be guided by a provided image.

Examples

Supplementary Video

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Desmond Liu for their feedback on the manuscript, Achilleas Xydis for the discussion on acoustic diffusers, Bharath Seshadri, Anna Maria Eggler, and Henry Welch for their help in the fabrication of the Acoustic Reliefs, as well as Rafael Bischof, Pengbin Tang, and Yuhan Zhang for their help in the measurement of the Acoustic Reliefs.

Partial support for this work was provided by the Office of Naval Research (Grant N000142512024) for Doug L. James and Kangrui Xue.