Acoustic Reliefs

Jeremy Chew¹, Michal Piovarči¹, Kangrui Xue², Doug L. James², Bernd Bickel¹

¹ETH Zürich, ²Stanford University

Published at 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.

Useful Links

Learn more about this project on our project page.

Access the code on Github.

Watch the supplementary video here.

Examples

0.6m Diffusers

0.9m Diffusers

Office Diffusers