Texture Synthesis Examples - Page 1 (McDermott and Simoncelli)

There are four examples of each sound: the original from which the statistics were measured, a synthetic version matching only the spectrum of the original sound, a synthetic version matching the marginal statistics of "cochlear" filter envelopes (producing the same spectrum, and sparsity, as the original recording), and a synthetic version matching a larger set of statistics (including correlations between filters).

Matching the spectrum alone produces signals that sound like noise, and that rarely resemble the original sound. Matching the marginal statistics (yielding sounds with sparsity comparable to the originals) generally produces realistic synthesis only for water, and the results often sound watery irrespective of whether the original sound was water or not. We believe this is because the salient properties of water are produced by independent bandpass events, and are thus easily captured by marginal statistics of bandpass filters. Most other sounds have statistical dependencies that are more complex. With the larger set of statistics, however, we can synthesize many different natural sound textures.

The synthesis algorithm, along with experiments exploring the perception of textures, is described in this paper (2011, Neuron). An earlier version of this work is described in this paper (2009, WASPAA). The perception of texture was further explored in this paper (2013, Nature Neuroscience).

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