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.